


Dreams in the Wolf-House

by Guede



Series: Of Werewolves and Tentacles [3]
Category: Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Melissa McCall, Cthulhu Mythos, F/M, Good Parent Melissa McCall, Hallucinations, Humor, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Pack Cuddles, Pack Dynamics, Scott McCall & Stiles Stilinski Friendship, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Slow Build Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 21:53:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8817586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: “Got it, got it!” Stiles pants, reaching the door.  Scott’s off the bed and trying to tell him something, but Scott’s also attempting to stuff on his sneakers at the same time so it’s too garbled.  Anyway, Stiles already has the door open, and, since he’s not stupid, angled to shield him and his phone that’s open to repelling hexes.  “Got it—hi, so, um, Scott can’t come right this second but how about you give me your name, number, and probability of hostile intentions?”Also, Stiles is still tracking down that Great Old Ones-summoning villain.  It’s just taking a while to remember how Beacon Hills works.





	1. Chapter 1

Stiles does his best, but by the time they actually get to Scott and Allison’s place, he’s pretty much a zombie himself. He has a vague memory of Scott telling him he can’t go to bed like that, here, sit down while I get you something to wipe off the mud, and of sitting down. Except the thing he sits on is way softer and longer than a couch or an armchair and when he flops over it catches him and lets him stretch out and just a couple minutes, okay? Just a second.

Which is why, when he wakes up to warm afternoon daylight streaming over him, all nice and toasty under a bedsheet even though he’s just in his boxers, somebody gently snuggled up to his back, he doesn’t freak out. He just thinks: _not bad, octo-evil, not bad at all_.

Of course, then he opens his eyes and finds himself facing one Peter Hale, loosely curled up on the couch-bed across from Stiles, bare-chested with a vaguely satisfied smile on his face, and he realizes that the _Cthulhic_ dimension is not, in fact, fucking with him. Armitage’s Razor, never ascribe to the Great Old Ones what is properly humanity’s jerkitude legacy.

“Don’t thrash, Stiles,” Peter murmurs without opening his eyes or tweaking that goddamn smile of his. “McCall did a very thorough job getting the dirt off you last night, it’d be a shame to reward his efforts with a kick in the head.”

“Wh—stop making it sound so _nasty_ , okay, I’m a lot of things but homebreaker isn’t one,” Stiles hisses. While trying to twist around to see who the hell is behind him, if Peter is there, and God, this is—this is—

This is, Stiles thinks, looking down at Scott and Allison happily entwined in each other’s arms, Scott quietly snoring into Allison’s hair, irrationally adorable. It’s the kind of adorable where even die-hard cynic him muffles his snort and wonders when the Disney musical starts up, and doesn’t even really ask why they’re all piled together. Not _really_.

“Werewolves find a great deal of comfort in physical proximity,” Peter goes on, the laziest, smuggest lecturer in the world. His shoulders drop and he arches back his head, holds the pose, and then relaxes with a little whistling sigh. The bedsheet slides another inch down his ripply, open to the free air, highlighted in sunshine abs. “Not uncommon for them to reaffirm pack security by spending a night together. Completely nonsexual, though of course outsiders are constantly misunderstanding, but that’s the perverted nature of society these days.”

“Um. Yeah. Okay.” Stiles wiggles his elbow under himself and rocks his left leg, a little at a time, and manages to shift the Scott-and-Allison bundle off his foot without waking them. He lets out the breath he’d been holding and folds up his leg to try and sit up. “Right, noted, pack sleepovers are a thing, no problem, I’ve shared before. Somebody always forgets their tent and in the Arctic, any sleeping bag in an insta-frostbite storm—”

His knee bumps into unmistakably bare skin and he looks down, then looks back up just as quickly when he realizes how far below that point is from Peter’s waist. Peter’s finally cracked open his eyes and the man is _enjoying_ this.

“Don’t look so betrayed, Stiles,” Peter says. “We _did_ try to move you to the guest room, but you held the mattress so tight Scott thought you’d rip it open if we kept at it.”

Sadly, that does sound accurate, and damn Stiles’ instinct, finely-honed over many expeditions with selfishly-hoarding fellow students, for never giving up a comfort once he’s taken possession. “Yeah, and don’t tell me, my grabby hands then made you strip naked,” Stiles mutters, while carefully inching away his knee.

Peter snorts. “Don’t be absurd. I was covered in mud and it’s a long drive back to the house, and unfortunately, I had no idea I needed to pack a spare set of clothing. Besides, I assure you, we all respected your—”

And then Peter flicks off the bedsheet. Stiles yelps and leaps for the top of the couch, and his foot catches part of the sheet and throws it even further off the bed, while under its billowing, somebody snarls and has glowy eyes, while somebody else hisses and yanks out something that smacks into the floating sheet and briefly outlines a gun shape, and—and there’s Peter. Propped up on one arm, watching them all with calculated befuddlement, as he continues to hold out Stiles’ phone to Stiles. The phone that had been tucked between him and Stiles, as if one, chivalry is remotely revivable these days, and two, that’s no sword even if some of the incantations on it might result in a decently similar wound pattern, and three—three, just, God. Stiles isn’t even _hungover_ this time.

“Stiles?” Allison pulls down the sheet and tucks the whatever weapon back out of sight. She rubs at bleary eyes. “Oh…what time is it?”

Scott rolls partway out of the bed and hangs his mussed head over the side, groping for something on the floor. “Crap, Mom called,” he mutters, thumbing at his phone.

“Hmm,” Peter says, lounging in what is in fact a pair of boxers, even if they are very tight, high-cut, amazingly lacking in visible seams boxers. “I think my clothes might be dry now. Stiles, would you mind—”

“Oh, not at _all_ ,” Stiles says, snatching his phone from him and scrambling off the back of the couch. 

He lands off-balance, but sheer momentum keeps him stumbling into the neatly-pinned line of clothing stretched across the far wall. Stiles grabs down a shirt and flings it over his shoulder, trusting that that burning laser of amusement he feels on his back will guide it to its smirking destination. Then he pulls down another one, and he’s yanking it over his head as somebody starts pounding on the door. Which is also very far from Peter, and yeah, Scott has been super-nice so far, so the least that Stiles can do is answer that for him. And also, avoid finding out whether Peter’s a left- or right-leg first guy, because there are, in fact, things in this world Stiles doesn’t need to know. He really doesn’t. He is better than his base needs, he is.

“Got it, got it!” Stiles pants, reaching the door. Scott’s off the bed and trying to tell him something, but Scott’s also attempting to stuff on his sneakers at the same time so it’s too garbled. Anyway, Stiles already has the door open, and, since he’s not stupid, angled to shield him and his phone that’s open to repelling hexes. “Got it—hi, so, um, Scott can’t come right this second but how about you give me your name, number, and probability of hostile intentions?”

The man standing in the hall stares at Stiles like that last one should be completely clear just from the eyebrows. He’s tall and built and somewhere between Stiles and Laura in age, and come to think of it, there’s a vague similarity in the facial region. Mostly the way he looks like this is obviously designed to annoy him.

Then his eyes drop to Stiles’ chest region. His nostrils flare. He twitches and his expression changes to a mix of exasperation and disgust, and just as Stiles also looks down and realizes that this is _not_ his shirt, the man extends one arm, grabs the door knob, and shuts the door.

Stiles stares at the door. Then shakes his head and turns away, while also yanking off Peter’s shirt as fast as his human joints and muscles will allow. “Um.”

“Sorry, let me,” Scott says. He’s gotten up to Stiles and opens the door again, catching the man in mid-turn. “Derek, hey, I thought you were in New York…where are you going?”

“Back,” Derek says, taking another step towards the stairs.

“Can you not call ahead?” Peter says. When he comes up, Stiles’ flannel shirt hanging from his shoulders, he’s so irritated he doesn’t even seem to notice Stiles twitching off that shirt and tossing his shirt around his neck. “Are you actually incapable of it? Because you have a phone, and I know you know how to use it, and have we not explained to you, in _excruciating_ detail, that it takes longer to find you if you’re not where we think you are when somebody kidnaps you?”

Derek does an about-face and stalks back up the hall like he’s bringing that personal thunderhead right into the apartment. Of course Scott’s in the way, smiling politely but with sincere cross-the-mat-cross-me-ness, and after a second, Derek drops back with a huffy grunt. “I did call,” Derek snaps. “I got voicemail every single time, and the one time I didn’t, Cora just says she’s gotta go, our house got invaded again and evil alien octopus things are trying to _eat_ us and talk to McCall and what the hell was I supposed to think?”

“Well, one, we’re not—he’s not—wardrobe mix-up, totally innocent,” Stiles can’t help saying, as he stuffs himself into his own shirt. “Just. For the record.”

Both Derek and Peter look at him, Peter’s amusement slightly dimmed, Derek’s aggravation way up. Then Derek looks back at Peter, but gives Stiles a chin-jerk. “Who the hell is that?”

“My _friend_ Stiles,” Scott says. He’s still trying to keep up that smile, but it’s a strain. “So, um, we were just going to start breakfast, so would you like to come in? You know, before the, um, the neighbors start thinking I’m running a gang again?”

“Melissa and Laura are going to get here soon, too,” Allison calls. She’s moved into the kitchen area, and when they all turn and look at her, she holds up a box of mix and a carton of eggs. “Which do you think will make your mom less mad at us, Scott? Omelets or pancakes?”

* * *

“First of all, they’re not trying to eat us,” Stiles says.

Scott makes ridiculously fluffy, mouth-melting omelets, capable of stopping an alpha-beta fight dead in its tracks, even though Laura and Derek are still passive-aggressively hoarding the hot sauce and the pepper grinder, respectively, from each other. However, they are not good enough to stop Melissa on a parental roll of disappointment.

“ _First_ of all, Stiles, I want to talk about how you lied to me,” she says. She’s clearly set up for a long, angry rant, hands on hips, not so much as a glance at the plate of food Allison slides in front of her. Then she steps back from the counter. She looks up, she looks down, she lets out a long, aggravated breath and then takes her hands off her hips and rakes them back through her hair, pausing to rub at her temples. “Stiles. Listen. I’m not your father, I know it’s not my job to lecture you on what to do with your life. But I am responsible for this town. I’ve been trying to work with you on this, but if you just—go off on your own, fighting God knows what in the downtown, and I don’t know till I get the—that makes it very hard to do my job and make sure people don’t ask questions and make things hard for those of us to have to live here afterward. You understand?”

“I could’ve called you sooner too,” Scott breaks in. He’s in earnest, even if it’s conveniently timed. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

Melissa clearly knows the power of maintaining eye contact till she shrivels the asshole out of somebody, and she doesn’t want to look over at him. But he keeps standing there, softly-sizzling bacon platter in hand, giving off serious sorry-puppy vibes, and even she can’t resist that. Even if it’s just a quick jerk of her head. “Yeah, you could’ve, and we’re going to talk about you and Erica and Boyd running around in the sewers but Scott, I know Stiles is your friend but you can’t just—”

“No, he can’t, and he shouldn’t, and I’m touched, I’m not gonna lie, but he didn’t know,” Stiles says. “I faked him out too. Him and Allison. They had no idea.”

“Well, look, if you get in a car with Peter I think you’re up to _something_ , and I’m an Argent and should know better,” Allison mutters. She’s definitely not as into the whole public confessional ritual as the rest of them, witness how she deploys some glasses and a carton of orange juice to avoid meeting Melissa’s eyes. “Also, speaking of—”

Peter quickly smooths away his annoyance and puts on an appropriately penitent face. Melissa looks at him, rolls her eyes, and picks up her fork and knife. “Save it, Peter. Much as I’d like to hear your version and get in a laugh somewhere today, we’ve got too much going on.”

“Yeah, we do, and since I think you want to get to the progress report just as much as I do, I’m just gonna say—I’m sorry. I’ve been working by you and not with you, and I do know the difference,” Stiles says. He takes a deep breath as Melissa looks at him again. “I know how to work in a team, too, and I’ll do that going forward.”

He’s expecting the surprise, but it’s over quicker than he’s used to, just a quick widening of the eyes, and then Melissa is _smiling_ at him. Like she actually trusts him on that. “I know you do,” she says warmly. “I know you care a lot, you always have, whatever it is, and it’s one of your best traits, Stiles. Just stop letting it lead you into trouble. Now, what _was_ last night?”

“Cross-entity aggression, I think. I mean, they were dying at the time, but the Deep One did _not_ seem thrilled about being here, and definitely wasn’t supporting Shub-Niggurath,” Stiles says, as a whoosh of tension leaves his shoulders. He fiddles with his silverware, then realizes he, well, _has_ those, and starts to dig into his food. “Which is really weird. They’re not always on the same page, but usually you don’t see Great Old One followers mauling each other.”

Derek snorts and reaches for the Cholula bottle Laura is cuddling. “You could’ve just said it was another cult.”

“So my initial guess is, the evil wizard is focusing on Shub-Niggurath, but maybe he wasn’t that careful about some of the secondary rituals so he attracted other entities, too,” Stiles says. “Sometimes you get internal politics about which Cthulhic entity gets to try and mentally maul us first—which is _not_ eating us—and they can get snippy with each other.”

“It’s not a cult, it’s some asshole trying to drive us all insane, which is why I _told_ you to stay in New York,” Laura hisses back. Not letting go of the hot sauce. “If it ends up being another ex of yours, I swear to God, I _will_ let Cora vet all your dates from now on.”

She and Derek aren’t being that quiet about it, but everybody seems to be ignoring them. Well, Peter looks like he’s torn between burning in unearned shame and unloading that on somebody else, preferably with a side of disownment, but he’s mostly concentrating on Stiles and Melissa.

“So you’re saying that we might have multiple parties trying to attack us?” Melissa says.

“I did go back and clean off the road,” Peter adds, looking a little odd. After a second, Stiles realizes that’s what happens when Peter forces his face into sincere regret. “I also just went ahead and burned my copy of the _Necronomicon_.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think they came because of what you did, that’d just bring the ones in the house,” Stiles says to Peter, and then he turns to Melissa. “I don’t think we have to worry about anything but Shub-Niggurath. I…talked to my dad about that, because there’s a Deep One colony off the Massachusetts coast—which, by the way, is seriously top-secret stuff so please, _please_ don’t talk about it, it’ll get the State Department mad plus attract all the extraterrestrial conspiracy idiots—”

Derek gives up on the hot sauce, but then grabs the orange carton from Allison, right when Laura’s reaching for it to refill his glass. His glass is full so he just, seriously, mad-dog glares Laura while drinking straight from the carton. So it looks like there’s not much left in there anyway, but still. “You always bring up my _two_ exes,” he says, lowering the carton to jab his finger at her. “I’m across the _country_ and we’re locked out of our house again because somebody wrecked it? How many times is that now?”

“But…aren’t they actually extraterrestrials?” Allison asks, raising her voice over the bickering. “Not that any of us are going to tell conspiracy people they’re right, but…”

“Yeah, yeah, but those people are annoying ‘cause they think aliens just show up in shiny ships and bribe our government to do massive cover-ups,” Stiles explains. “I mean, sure, we _do_ do cover-ups, but trust me, the aliens don’t pay us for that. We’re lucky if we get cultural exchange like with the Deep Ones, and even they eventually want to breed us out of existence and take over.”

“Breed?” Melissa says sharply.

Stiles winces. “Um, well, apparently, the seventies weren’t the only times it was swingin’ over in New England, and anyway, contraception includes mental barriers these days and the point is, the Deep One was fighting whatever is going on. Although don’t take that as they’re allies. Best-case scenario, they just back off and see who the winner is.”

“Well, that’s going to be us,” Melissa says firmly. She finishes up her current mouthful and then reaches down to get something from her bag. Then she comes up again with a folder, which she flips open on the counter to reveal printouts of graphs and pie-charts. “It sounds like we’re back to finding the original wizard, right?”

“Derek, I’m just trying to keep things under control here,” Laura says in an exasperated tone. “We’re already in the middle of a mess and the last thing we need is it getting worse because you lose your temper and punch somebody in the face. Which you do _every_ time you help Scott out.”

“That’s because none of you ever tell me what’s going on till somebody tries to punch _me_ in the face!” Derek snaps.

Melissa’s mouth thins. She hesitates, one hand still over the papers, and then turns, but Peter’s already smacked his glass against the counter. “If you two would _listen_ ,” Peter says icily. “We’re about to go over strategy. And then you might actually find out who you are and are not allowed to beat up. Both of you. Because this is _exactly_ why I never tell you what _I’m_ up to.”

“Also, honestly, Derek, you don’t have to help,” Scott says, somehow making it sound concerned rather than patronizing. “You did a lot with the undines last month and if you want to sit this one out, I think we have enough people, especially with Stiles here.”

Derek sort of looks like he’d like to punch Scott in the face. Though to his credit, he also looks a little guilty about that. He…doesn’t really sort out of the contradiction there, but does slouch back and mutter something about not meaning to interrupt. Next to him, Laura grimaces and gives Peter a reluctant kind of acknowledging nod.

“Sorry,” she says to Melissa. She shifts back on her stool, then grimaces again and slaps the Cholula into Derek’s chest without looking at him. “So where were we?”

“I’ve been trying to pull together what we have on the patients,” Melissa says.

“Oh, I should ask Danny how he’s doing,” Scott suddenly says, pulling out his phone.

His mom gently catches his wrist. “I called him earlier and he says somebody wiped the drive and he’s working on restoring it,” she says. “I called Carla too, to see if she or her family had any idea who Poppy was working with, but they don’t. So I know that you said the patients probably wouldn’t be coherent enough to tell us anything useful, Stiles, but I thought it was worth a try.”

Stiles pokes at his eggs. He slept so long and so deep that, even though everything happened literally just yesterday, the memories are a little detached and he’s struggling to pull the connections back together. Which is why normally, he tries not to interrupt a good investigative groove with things like sleep, but he’s pretty sure Melissa and Scott will be even less for three-day Red Bull binges than his dad is. “Could Danny tell _when_ the drive was wiped?”

Melissa frowns. “I didn’t ask, but I can call him again,” she says. “Why?”

“Well, because—Erica! Erica said Ligotti was a zombie _meat_ -puppet,” Stiles says, his head jerking up. “Damn, I wasn’t really listening, figured she was just going for a zinger, but now that I think about it, call her.”

Scott was already dialing, probably for Danny, but Allison takes out her phone and gestures to him that she’s got it. “What’s important about Erica?” she asks.

“Because she called him a meat-puppet,” Stiles says. “Not just a zombie, like he’d be if the evil wizard was just ordering him around to clean up evidence at the garden store or wiping the laptop—anyway, he was probably still alive for that. Those people at his building would’ve noticed if he left with a bullethole in his chest, right?”

“Um, I…yeah,” Scott says. “But what’s the—”

“There’s zombie and then there’s possessed. And sometimes, even, possessed corpse, which is _also_ not a zombie,” Stiles explains. “So maybe Erica was just joking around, but let’s ask.”

* * *

“No, I meant meat-puppet,” Erica says once she’s over and happily scarfing down Scott-made omelets. “C’mon, Scott, you were there too, you heard him.”

“I didn’t think he was saying anything interesting,” Scott says. “Just the usual stuff about killing us and we’ll never stop him and we don’t know anything.”

Erica rolls her eyes. “McCall, I know Allison does all the detective work so you can get with the heroic poses, but would it kill you once in a while to stop—”

Laura lets out a long, low, plate-rattling noise that makes Erica drop her fork. When Erica looks up, Laura gives her an impatient glower that really, really makes Laura look like Derek’s resting bitchface. “Stop messing around and just spit it out,” Laura orders.

“Okay, okay, it’s just, Boyd buys herb pots from that place sometimes. Well, he’s not gonna anymore, but we’ve gone in when Ligotti was working, and back then he had a little bit of an accent,” Erica says. She picks up her fork again and starts shoveling her food even faster into her mouth, with furtive looks towards Laura. “And last night he didn’t.”

“So…you could tell he wasn’t him,” Stiles says, and she nods. “And who he was, was somebody with a different accent? A really distinctive one that only one person in this whole town has? Or a telltale catchphrase?”

Erica stops inhaling her food and looks weirdly at Stiles. “No, like Scott said, he was just yelling the same stuff all the bad guys yell. And nope, when I say no accent, I mean no accent. Just regular whitebread American.”

Stiles sighs. “You know, normally it really isn’t this hard to pick out evil,” he mutters.

“Well, how close do you have to be to possess somebody that way?” Peter asks.

“You don’t, if you can just pass them some kind of activator, like a gemstone or Cthulhu vinyl collectible, and…okay, I have to ask, why would you stick on ‘that way’?” Stiles asks.

Peter actually hesitates. He doesn’t give anything away except regret that he can’t answer that one, but Laura straightens up and sticks her hand on Derek’s back, while Derek scowls and shakes her off, and then abruptly grabs up his plate and stalks into the kitchen.

They’d all moved to eat in the living room, but it’s open-floor plan and the kitchen is not exactly adequate for avoiding the subject, even if Derek turns on the sink faucet full-blast and starts scrubbing dishes like he’s stripping the glaze off them. Allison frowns and takes a couple steps towards him, but then Scott nudges her. They share a look and then Scott goes around collecting empty dishes.

“We had a possession issue a while ago, but that wasn’t Cthulhic, that was this evil spirit,” Scott says when he gets to Stiles. He has to say ‘Cthulhic’ really slowly, but he actually pronounces it correctly, and looks happy when Stiles nods in approval. “Deaton handled most of the details, if you need them.”

“You’ll have to talk to him some other time,” Laura says right away, with a sharp look at Scott. “He’s over at our house, putting the protection wards back up. Besides, if that wasn’t about the tentacle aliens, how would that help us find this evil guy?”

“Yeah, I know,” Stiles says. He is going to follow up with Deaton on that one, because sure, his area of expertise is Cthulhic entities, but possession is one subject where it never hurts to compare notes. But he does this for the knowledge, not for the sadistic joy of poking other people’s trauma—unlike some of his professors—so he can backburner that one. “So I guess Ligotti’s a dead end, at least till we can recover his hard drive.”

Erica makes a noise, and then bobs her head a little, looking a bit bulgy-eyed. She puts her hand to her mouth and keeps it there till Scott, who’d stopped on his way to Derek with the dirty dishes, hands her a glass of water. Once she’s cleared her throat, she looks over at Stiles. “Well, so there was one other thing, now that I think about it. Ligotti smelled weird. Don’t tell me you missed that too, McCall.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah,” Scott says thoughtfully. “It was hard to tell since, um…”

“He was a two-day-old corpse who’d killed a Deep One with his bare hands?” Stiles suggests.

Scott nods. “Yeah, but now that I’m thinking about it, the shirt we got out of his apartment smelled like that too, and he would’ve had to get that stained before he died, right? There wasn’t any blood on it.”

“What did he smell like?” Melissa asks.

Both Scott and Erica look the kind of frustrated you get when you know what you mean, but your brain doesn’t know what you mean. “I’m trying to—it was really unique, and I know I’ve smelled it before, but I just—I can’t remember—” Scott finally says.

“Something from home?” Laura says. “Food, perfume, car smell? What else is around—he worked in a garden store—”

“It wasn’t any kind of plant,” Erica says, frowning. “Definitely not natural, I remember thinking that.”

“Something else we’ve fought?” Peter suggests. “Something we’ve killed? An animal? A person?”

Scott rubs at the side of his head like he’s getting a headache. “No…I think it must’ve come up during a fight, because it was definitely raising my hackles, but…maybe it’s mechanical?”

“Something at school?” Derek says. He’s run out of dishes and turned off the water and come to the edge of the kitchen area.

Erica snaps her fingers, then points at him. “That’s it. Must’ve been a fight at school.”

Then they all stare awkwardly at each other. Erica’s trying to signal something with her eyebrows, which Stiles doesn’t quite think Scott understands, but what Scott _does_ understand, he’s embarrassed about. Laura looks between Erica and Scott and then drops her head in her hands, muttering about Mom never having to deal with this crap.

“So, um, I have a feeling…but for completion’s sake, I have to ask,” Stiles finally says. “Do we know which fight this was?”

“I’m not sure,” Scott says, looking with a pretty forlorn kind of hope at Erica.

Who rolls her eyes and blows out her cheeks in annoyance. “Jesus, if you can’t remember, how should I know? Half the time you didn’t get around to calling us up till after the bodies had hit the ground.”

“That’s because _you_ guys were too busy running around spooking people in the preserve, like turning into a werewolf’s some kind of game,” Allison snaps.

Erica sneers a little, showing off some fangs, but before she and Allison and Laura—who, to her credit, looks really annoyed at having to huff herself up beside Erica—can really get into it, Melissa raises her hands. “All right, all right,” she says. “Look. I can’t get you into the morgue for a few hours, but this shirt you grabbed, did you take it to the clinic? How about we just go over and see if it jogs your memory anymore?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Armitage is Professor Armitage from _The Dunwich Horror_.
> 
> In traditional chivalry stories, when the hero and the chaste maiden are forced to share a bed due to weather/etc., the hero always puts his sword in between them to show he will respect her honor.
> 
> Deep One colony on the East Coast references _The Shadow Over Innsmouth_.
> 
> The distinction between a zombie (mindless servant) and a living person possessing a dead body references _The Thing on the Doorstep_.


	2. Chapter 2

Allison and Laura both have to take off for preserve-patrol duties, but Peter volunteers to help drive, which gives them an extra car so Erica and Scott don’t have to ride together. “I get that you two aren’t in the same pack or anything, but she seems kind of hostile. What’s the deal?” Stiles asks on the way over. “Something happen with you guys?”

“No, not really,” Scott says, glancing over at his mom in shotgun. 

So it’s not the best situation for that kind of question, Stiles sees that. Melissa’s pretty clearly monitoring the conversation, but she’s also having some kind of texting war with the sheriff, going by her irritated mumbling, and she’s not _stopping_ it yet. And Stiles figures she’ll at least let Scott talk, whereas if a Hale is around, that’s less likely to happen and Stiles has spent a _ridiculously_ high percentage of his three days in Beacon Hills with various Hales in earshot.

“Erica’s just…it’s not really her fault,” Scott goes on, just when Stiles had been going to prompt him. “It’s just awkward. The thing is, once I figured out how to shift, I told Laura that I’d help her but I wasn’t going to be in her pack, I was going to keep on figuring out stuff with Allison and Mom.”

“She didn’t bite you anyway, and none of them were much help till Peter got out of his coma,” Melissa mutters. “Not that he didn’t make you pay for the help, but at least he had some to give. That woman just needs to learn when to admit she’s bluffing, if you ask me.”

Scott makes a small, affectionate noise, looking at her again. Then he glances into the rearview mirror and catches Stiles’ eye. “We did have these other werewolves coming in and trying to challenge Laura, so she decided she’d better build up her pack and she started biting people.”

“Who are all around your age, and sounds like you all went to school together,” Stiles observes.

“Yeah, that’s where it got awkward,” Scott mutters, scrubbing at the side of his face. “She kind of picked them for me. I still don’t…really understand her reasoning, but I think in a really weird way, she was trying to show she was, um, friendly. Like she and I didn’t need to fight, she wasn’t turning them so she’d go after _me_ , like she would’ve if she’d been hitting upperclassmen I didn’t really know.”

“Okay, so, was this more like she was turning people to make it more likely you’d eventually join up?” Stiles says.

Scott sighs. “I don’t think so? It wasn’t all just me, they all knew Cora too, and when you’re just starting a pack, or rebuilding one, it’s supposed to be easier if everybody’s close to the same age. Less in-fighting that way.”

That reminds Stiles of what Peter had been saying, though he’d slanted it differently, less politics and more natural coming-of-age. Peter had seemed pretty sincere at the time, but then, he also seems sincere about enjoying how much his flirting weirds Stiles out, and Miskatonic makes all freshmen take an Unreliable Narrators course because occasionally they _do_ think about equipping students with survival skills. “Actually, about that, I had a werewolf question.”

“Sure, go ahead,” Scott says, while Melissa raises her head a bit but doesn’t interrupt.

“It’s just I can’t help noticing the, you know, posturing,” Stiles says. “And okay, I’m not Miss Manners but I don’t like being rude when I don’t _know_ I’m being rude, and anyway, I’m not sure if I’m making you do a lot of werewolf apologies or anything—”

“What? No, no, you’re fine, that’s not—that is definitely not about you,” Scott says, all hasty reassurance with a touch of annoyance that is clearly not directed at Stiles. “If you do something, I’ll let you know, but you’re—you’re not a werewolf, you know. We know you don’t know.”

Melissa puts her phone away and turns back to look at Stiles. “If it wasn’t you, it’d be something else, so don’t feel like you need to walk on eggshells,” she says. “It _is_ a little…unique to have two alphas in the same town, but Laura does understand Scott’s not ever going to threaten her role in her pack. Even if some of her packmates still don’t get the message.”

“That’s not really it, Mom,” Scott says. Very quietly, without any kind of snap to it, but firm all the same. They hit a stoplight and he looks over his shoulder at her, then back at Stiles. “I know it looks like everybody argues a lot, but believe me, we’re a lot better these days than we used to be. I think Laura was being really strict at the start because she’d lost most of her family, and she—she does care about Erica and all of them, she doesn’t just look at them as soldiers. If she did, we wouldn’t get along.”

“I suppose that’s true, but she still could give you more credit for helping her ease back from that without everything blowing up in her face,” Melissa snorts. “Less said about that monster Isaac had for a father, the better, but Erica and Boyd both have loving families and it’s wonder they haven’t up and moved out of town.”

Scott smiles at her. “Well, not really a wonder so much as how you handled them, Mom,” he says. He keeps smiling as Melissa snorts again, which doesn’t really cover her pleased look, and goes back to her buzzing phone. “Anyway, that’s the awkward part. Laura and I are all right these days, but I guess Erica and some of the others were used to complaining to me about her, and I didn’t know much about packs back then either, so I…would help but maybe not in the best way for everybody.”

“ _Oh_ , gotcha, Erica resents you because she can’t play Daddy against Mommy anymore?” Stiles says.

Melissa’s head jerks a little, and then she starts cackling into her hand. She glances at Scott, who has wide eyes and a bright red blush, then reaches over to pat at his shoulder, still cackling. “Oh—it’s all right, Scott, he’s right—he is _so_ right—”

“Well, gotta say, that one’s not just limited to werewolves,” Stiles says, grinning. The clinic’s coming into sight so he kicks back and hikes up his bag into his lap, making sure he’s got everything he might need. “You think it’d help if anybody left town? Not that I’m saying anybody _should_ , I’m just thinking you add in the usual small-town in each other’s pockets stuff…”

“We’re actually not all here all the time,” Scott says, steering them into the parking lot. He’s taking his time with his answer, but just because he’s thoughtful, no other reason, and from the way Melissa’s now hissing into her phone at somebody in Records, she isn’t seeing any red flags either. “It’s just we all came back after graduation, and then stuff started happening so nobody’s left. But almost all of us went to different colleges, Derek’s on the East Coast half the time for work, and I think Peter’s been looking to move, too.”

They park and Scott and Melissa get out, while Stiles swings his feet out of the car but keeps his upper body inside, zipping up his bag again. Then he pulls himself out. “Interesting, they’re her actual blood family,” Stiles says. “That’s not some werewolf insult thing, is it?”

“I don’t think so,” Scott says. His voice is suddenly a lot lower and then he nods, and Stiles turns to see Peter’s car coming down the street. “Derek had some things happen to him, so he’s got, well, bad associations here, and I think Peter might be, um, bored—”

“And here I thought his lifelong dream was to sit around sipping his fancy coffee with an endless stream of monster hijinks to criticize,” Stiles says.

“It is, but give him his due, he’s proud enough that he’d rather you listen to him so he gets to say I-told-you-so than not listen to him and get somebody who annoys him killed off,” Melissa mutters. She waves at Peter’s car, then gestures towards the clinic doors.

Deaton’s already come out to meet them, and once they’ve all piled out of the cars—Derek’s come too, Stiles notices—he leads them into an examination room where he’s laid out the scraps of Ligotti’s shirt. “I ran a few tests using your leftover materials. I hope you don’t mind—” he says to Stiles, who has a kneejerk moment of possessiveness before remembering that that stuff was going to break down to uselessness by this morning anyway. So Stiles shrugs and Deaton pulls out a notebook. “Definitely traces of Shub-Niggurath and the fertilizer. On the other hand, when I pulled out my tests for the different soils around here—”

“You do soil science?” Stiles says.

“Well, a bit. I didn’t major in it, but I’ve always loved gardening and I did a graduate-school rotation in the greenhouse at Summer Country College in Cornwall,” Deaton says, a little modestly. “And since I’ve come to an area with a—well, which had an active Nemeton, it’s come in very handy with my normal druid duties.”

“Oh, cool, I thought about doing an exchange semester at Summer Country because of their Nodens dig sites, but Miskatonic’s Antarctica lab had an extra opening that year, so—” And then Stiles realizes how everybody is staring at them, and pivots on his heel to wave at the shredded shirt. “About the soil tests, then.”

“Nothing much, I’m afraid.” Deaton deflates a little bit too, clearly wishing he could go back to his simpler, less messy student days. “He’s been in the preserve at some point, and around town, but I was hoping I’d get a trace showing who his supplier was and I didn’t. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t left Beacon Hills lately.”

Melissa sighs. “And Danny still hasn’t recovered the hard drive. All right, Erica, Scott, you’ve smelled it, any idea—”

“It’s the time you and your friend made Molotov cocktails and almost bombed my car,” Derek immediately says.

They all look at him, but he doesn’t look up, just keeps glowering at the shirt in remembered disgust. Then Erica leans over, sniffs, blinks a few times. “Oh, yeah, that _is_ it,” she says. “The acid that went into it. But wait, we almost bombed your car—”

“The time with the wendigo,” Derek adds sourly. “Different cocktail recipe.”

Erica makes a face at him. “Okay, okay, tight-ass. Sorry if I can’t keep straight the _five_ different times we did that, because you have to go and drive right into the fighting.”

“Oh, right,” Scott says, comprehension also dawning on his face. “That time. So we were in one of the upstairs chem labs—”

Derek drops his head into one hand and makes an aggravated noise. “East side, second from the stairs, the one with the roof access. Seriously, you guys were there a lot more recently than me, why am I the one who knows the layout?”

Stiles…actually kind of agrees with that, even if he’s not on board with Derek’s tone, but he admits he’s kind of spoiled by Miskatonic’s joint initiative with MIT to digitize and map several centuries of Cthulhic encounters for data-mining purposes of compiling the ultimate anti-Great Old Ones handbook. Kind of a Mirrorverse _Necronomicon_ , if you will.

Anyway, he knows bickering isn’t going to get them an evil wizard, so he clears his throat. “So okay, Ligotti was in that lab, so who has access to it?”

“I think we’ll have to talk to the principal,” Scott says, looking at Melissa. “They hired all those new people this year, I’m not sure who’d have the keys anymore.”

“Isn’t that the lab of that sadistic teacher of yours?” Peter asks, frowning. “I remember you all moaning about detention with him afterward.”

“What, Harris?” Erica says. “Nah, he got demoted our senior year, got caught screwing his barely-legal girlfriend in there. I think he got pushed over to freshman bio with the frogs.”

She’s smiling like she wants them to just ask how Harris got caught. None of them do, because they have more important priorities like calling the principal and finding out what would be a convenient time to investigate the school, and she pouts. Then she sees Stiles, grins, and starts rounding the table like maybe Stiles would be interested in more high school stories.

“We’ll have to wait till this evening,” Melissa reports, moving her phone away from her mouth. “They’re using it for prep sessions for that big conference, and saying they can’t cancel that without a lot of out-of-towners noticing. Is that all right?”

“I think we’re still in the evil-wizard recharging window. It’s not my first choice, but yeah, I think we can wait,” Stiles says. “I guess in the meantime, I _was_ supposed to be on vacation. Scott, weren’t we supposed to—”

“Oh, right!” Scott says. “Diner!”

Erica stares at them. “Don’t tell me you’re talking about that place near the preserve with the stale cake,” she says. “Besides, we all just ate. Personally, if I was going to take somebody around town, I’d—”

“I miss the diner,” Stiles says firmly. “I want to see the diner. It was a crucial formative experience in my childhood and would be life-affirming and all that jazz. So Scott and I, we’re going to the diner.”

“Okay, then. Well, I’m out,” Erica says, in the kind of incredulous tone you use when you get up close to that person you’ve been eyeing and realize that actually, they’re kind of screaming psycho date and neither the bathrooms nor the bar are near enough for you to claim you were actually going there.

So Stiles figures they’re set, except just then Melissa raises her head. “Scott, sorry, baby, but can you leave the car?” she says. “I have a three-thirty and Chris isn’t going to get over here in time to pick me up.”

“Oh, sure, of course,” Scott says. They smile at each other and then he backs off and lets her get back to her calls, and comes over to Stiles. “Allison took the bike, but we could catch the bus—”

“Don’t be absurd,” Peter says. “My car’s out front, and Derek and I are going that way anyway.”

This is a surprise to Derek, and not a fun one, but Peter does something involving a no-look shoulder wiggle and Derek just glowers at Stiles. Who looks at Scott, who looks like this is not his first choice but what are you going to do, be rude?

“Great,” Stiles says. “Sounds good, thanks.”

* * *

Peter’s actually a pretty good tour guide. He doesn’t have the personal touch of knowing every difference in the town that’s going to be significant to Stiles, but what he does have is a thorough and gleeful knowledge of Beacon Hill scandals, crimes, and mysteries, both supernatural and not. Which of course is an irresistible siren call to Stiles, even as he sees the way Peter’s smirking in the rearview mirror, but even Scott gets interested and asks questions.

Derek, on the other hand. Derek is grunty. That is not a typo, he is grumpy and he expresses it through grunts, so he’s grunty. The only times he breaks into full sentences are to point out that the story Peter is telling leaves out the part where this or that or the other thing almost killed him. He seems to almost get killed an awful lot, which maybe justifies the grunty behavior the rest of the time. 

But then: “My bag and my car are at McCall’s place. Why are we going home?”

“Because, nephew, _I_ need clothing,” Peter says, breaking his relaxed, full-bellied cat smile to flick a pointed look at Derek. “I’d say you’re free to leave if you want, except since these things _do_ carry out mental attacks—”

Derek goes back to grunting. Peter continues looking at him, lips pressed together, with an odd mix of frustration and what might actually be concern. Then Peter shrugs, turns back to the road, and picks up his story again.

Since nostalgia doesn’t actually give Stiles unlimited stomach capacity and he does want to eat at the diner, they go to the Hale house first. Once they’re there, Derek decides he might as well check his stuff and make sure it’s the way it’s supposed to. That takes longer than it does for Peter to reappear on the front porch with an overnight bag, and then Scott has to take a call from Allison, and obviously Stiles doesn’t really think Scott and Allison are conspiring against him, especially if it lands them on Peter’s side.

“But it’s still really convenient, isn’t it?” Stiles says. “Even, could we say, _serendipitous_?”

“While I’d agree you’re accurate on meaning, I can’t help but feel the usage is still a little improper, at least in indicating intent,” Peter says, though the lazy glint in his eye indicates Stiles is right on track. “But since we do have a free moment, may I ask if you’ve given any thought to my proposal?”

“You’d like to ask, sure, and I’d like to think about it, but one, you make a new proposal just about every time you sneak up on me, and two, I’ve been kind of busy monster-hunting, when I haven’t been passed out in Scott’s place,” Stiles says.

He’s maybe a little tart about it, but he’s surprised at how sharply Peter’s smile cools off. Peter’s eyes narrow and he stares hard at Stiles for several seconds. For a moment he actually looks as if he might turn around and go back inside, and just never come back. But then he tilts his head and it probably isn’t the change in angle, but he does look as if he’s changed his conclusion about Stiles.

“Is it that unusual, to have a research partner?” he suddenly asks.

Stiles bristles, and out of the corner of his eye, he can see Scott turning towards them. Scott went back to sit in the car to take his call, as what Stiles assumes is a polite way to deal with werewolf eavesdropping, but for all Stiles knows, panic shading to indignation is particularly fragrant, and werewolf smell has a longer range than werewolf hearing. Anyway, Peter at least has the grace not to smirk, but he definitely knows he’s hit the spot.

“No, it’s always better to have teams,” Stiles says after a moment. “I mean, these things get in your mind, you want somebody else around just to check that you’re still you, or that reality is still reality. Look, I _was_ thinking it over, but what exactly do you think we’ll be doing? Because this isn’t exactly the quick path to fortune and fame.”

“And neither of those are high on my priorities,” Peter says. For all his self-satisfaction, he’d been tensed up too, and Stiles realizes that when the man relaxes so that the porch rail creaks against his hip. “I’ve never cared so much about the quantity of those who know of me, as of the quality. As for money, my share of the family accounts will cover my needs, and I should even be able to contribute something towards expenses, though I can’t match a university endowment.” 

Stiles makes a face. “I didn’t mean—what my grant money doesn’t cover, Miskatonic almost always does, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, this isn’t like _Tomb Raider_ with tentacles.”

Peter smiles and drops his head, fiddling with something in his pants pocket. The tightness of his jeans seems to be fighting him, but eventually he manages to extract…yes, that _is_ a bag of jellybeans, as if he’s just running down the list of shady-guy warning signs. Also, how the hell he kept those in there without a suspicious bulge is…not a good reason for Stiles to be stooping down for a look.

Of course, as Stiles jerks himself back up, Peter takes the opportunity to slink a few inches closer, open bag of candy in hand, offering it with an innocent quirked eyebrow. When Stiles declines, he shrugs and feeds a couple jellybeans into his mouth, with tiny but amazingly obscene little noises of enjoyment. “That’s just as well,” Peter says, mumbling around the fingertip he’s licking. “I’m the first to accept that you have to defend what you want to keep, and obviously, as a werewolf, misguided property assessors are the least of it, but after the last few years here, I think I’d like some nice, peaceful time in a library.”

“Relatively speaking, right?” Stiles says. “Because okay, usually people know better than to try and set up a casting circle or anything like that right _in_ the archives, but there’s always that one guy, and then Dad has to go ask the dholes for the special cleansers, and…and is this for that rib at the grill?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Stiles,” Peter says, grinning, right before he rounds his lips and pushes a pink jellybean right into the empty middle of them.

Stiles gives up and gestures towards the candy bag. When Peter tilts it towards him, he sticks his hand all the way in, and Peter’s too distracted by the fact that he gets to briefly squeeze Stiles’ wrist—through plastic, but he still makes it feel like he’s in Stiles’ underwear—to notice Stiles has fisted up all the jellybeans. All of them.

They’re good, Stiles notes. Soda-flavored, and they actually fizz a little bit on your tongue. “Yeah, well, before you get too excited about a lifestyle change, I think I should be honest with you about what kind of career a degree from Miskatonic gets you. Even if it’s a double major in Esoteric Folklore and Xenochemistry and a minor in Eldritch Horrors—”

“Peter,” comes Derek’s irritated voice. Then the man himself appears, stalking out the door with one hand held awkwardly out so the slime all over it won’t drip on him. “Peter. What the hell.”

“I _told_ you not to touch anything outside of the taped sections,” Peter says, just as irritably. He glances at Stiles, then sighs and pushes Derek back inside. “Also, that we put the leftover cleaner in the kitchen, but God knows you’ll just grab the wrong bottle and melt off the sink again, so fine, come with me…”

Stiles goes to the car, and he takes the jellybeans with him. Hey, Peter offered, and Stiles didn’t even try to test them against the unicorn horn. And Scott says no thanks, he’s good when Stiles holds them out, so it looks like Stiles better finish them.

“Peter seems to like you,” Scott adds after a second, in a very conflicted tone. Most of the conflict isn’t from disbelief, like Stiles was expecting, so much as from guilt about prying into Stiles’ business.

“I got the guy under your roof for the night,” Stiles can’t help saying. “I’ve been told my idea of what’s socially acceptable is as close to the norm as Nyarlathotep is to a wedding band, but even I’m pretty sure that justifies an interrogation.”

Scott looks confused with a pinch of that eagerness he gets about reassuring Stiles they’re totally okay, Stiles isn’t screwing up anything. “He’s been in our place before. I’m not going to say Allison and I were thrilled about it, but it’s better than letting him walk around in bloody clothes.”

“Doesn’t your mom have the police all locked up?” Stiles asks, frowning. “I haven’t asked, but it’s definitely sounded like it.”

“Well, the sheriff listens to her, and Jordan’s a lot of help, and I think most of them don’t want to deal with the weird stuff if they can get us to do it,” Scott says. “But that’s not the same as liking it, and sometimes they get a little…like if we weren’t here, this stuff wouldn’t happen.”

Stiles snorts and then leans across the seat to pat Scott’s shoulder. “Bet when you do decide to take a vacation, your phone blows right up.”

It’s obvious at this point that Scott would never wallow in somebody else’s pain or discomfort, but he certainly doesn’t mind a wry smile. “Mom’s phone, but yeah.” Then something on the porch catches his eye, but when nobody comes out, he looks at Stiles again. “So, um, if you were wanting to hang out with Peter a little, I know we had a pretty packed schedule planned but I can—we’ll have to adjust it anyway, with all the stuff that’s happened…”

“Oh—oh, man, no, that’s okay,” Stiles says, and _man_ but Scott goes from downcast but stubbornly polite to delighted puppy at warp speed. Seriously, the way he perks up, it makes Stiles feel like he’s just wiped a couple black marks off his record—not that, as his dad would say, that’s anywhere near evening the books, but hey, it’s something. “No, no. I mean, Peter is—Peter is—Peter is interesting, and I’ll admit I want to figure out whether that’s interesting tell Dad to run a background check or interesting tell Dad to put him on the library no-admittance list, but I think he’s going to show up whatever we do. So I don’t think we really have to do special accommodations, or anything like that.”

Scott still looks relieved, but gradually his forehead wrinkles up. “So…I’m probably missing something, but are both of those bad things, or is one bad and one good?”

“What to tell Dad about him?” Stiles says. He starts to laugh and then stops himself and really thinks about it. “Well, honestly, at this time of year, it probably depends on which idiots he saved right before I tell him. But look, if it turns out I want private time, I’ll let you know. But I didn’t fly all the way out here just for Peter, no matter what he acts like.”

Scott smiles again. He’s happy for a second or two, and then that weird guilt comes over him. Actually, the guilt’s not that weird—it reminds Stiles of how Scott was before he moved, when the guy would always feel like there was no possible way he could deserve something just for himself—reason number two why Scott’s dad is a dick, after always dropping shit in Melissa’s lap and running off—and so he _had_ to be keeping it from somebody who might deserve it more. But that’s not in line with competent, staring-down-other-alphas werewolf Scott of the now, so that’s why it feels off.

“I think I’m being creepy— _you_ probably think I’m being creepy,” Scott mutters, rubbing at the side of his face. “With being so happy to see you, even though—you know, it’s been _years_ and we don’t really know much about each other now.”

“Nah, it’s not creepy,” Stiles says. Although uncomfortable Scott, then as now, makes _him_ uncomfortable, so he glances away at the house. Still no Hales. “Believe me, it’s nice to be somewhere where, for once, people actually try not to touch the stuff I tell them not to. Well, you know, Derek aside, but he just got here, I guess as a fellow East Coaster, I should give him some jet-lag slack.”

Scott makes a puzzled noise, but when Stiles looks back, he’s just shrugging like he’s never going to understand all that and it’s A-okay with him, he doesn’t need to. Which is also something nice that Stiles usually doesn’t get. “It’s just—it’s just you knew me before all this true alpha stuff,” Scott suddenly says, the words clipping each other a little as they rush out. “And I was really worried that if you found out about werewolves—but you actually _know_ supernatural stuff too and you still don’t care about true alphas and it’s just—it’s just I really appreciate that, Stiles. I really do.”

“I…am glad?” Stiles says. “I mean, I am. I’m just not sure—what did I do, again?”

“You don’t make a big deal out of me being a true alpha,” Scott says. “Everybody else does, and it _is_ a big deal and I try to live up to it, but sometimes I just feel…I was Scott McCall for seventeen years first, and that just doesn’t go _away_ , you know? Am I making any sense?”

“Well, I can’t honestly say I get all the nuances here, but I think I get the idea,” Stiles says after a moment’s thought. “So like I said, I’m not a werewolf expert, but hey, you were my best friend, and you still seem pretty cool. So if this is, I don’t know, something about true alphas can’t secretly like the Blue Ranger, well, fuck those assholes, they don’t deserve the cool toys anyway.”

For a second he’s not sure if he played the nostalgia card too hard, or if he’s just opened up another can of cultural miscommunication. But then Scott’s blank face clears up into a smile. Sure, when he leans back and rumples his hair, it’s in embarrassment, but not the nervous, withdrawn kind.

“Thanks,” he says. “And really, just let me know if you need something while you’re here. I know you ended up not missing the place, but I don’t want you to regret coming back, okay?”

That’s…not something Stiles gets to reply to, since just then, Peter and Derek come back out. At the same time, Scott’s phone goes off and he answers it, and it turns out to be his mom, telling them the principal changed his mind and they can head over to the school earlier than planned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lovecraft loves the Unreliable First-Person Narrator trope almost as much as he loves the dead-person epistolary trope.
> 
> The Summer Country in Celtic mythology (specifically, Cornish-flavored) is a liminal area, much associated with fairies and magic, that possibly has its roots in changes in the coastline, which retreated as the ocean level rose. For some period beforehand, the land still would've been accessible but only at low tide.
> 
> One of Nyarlathotep's signatures is that he's got his own flute-based entrance theme.
> 
> One underlying theme of this series is to write a Scott-Stiles friendship that's more balanced from the get-go.


	3. Chapter 3

So they put off their trip to the diner again, since frankly, Stiles isn’t going to enjoy it one bit if he has to sit there and know that a golden investigatory opportunity is passing him by. Peter drives them up to the high school, but per Melissa’s instructions, they go around to the back parking lot.

“They’re going to leave the gym door propped open for us,” Scott explains as they get out of the car. “Nobody should be in there, so I don’t think we need to leave anybody in the parking lot—”

“McCall!” shouts somebody. A man, running across the field towards them, waving a clipboard, with what seems like an unnaturally visible-from-distance manic grin. “McCall!”

Scott winces, while Derek, who’s still tagging along, puts his hand over his face. “Is he another werewolf?” Stiles asks, going on the shiny teeth.

Peter sighs. “No, that’s the lacrosse coach. He just likes them far too much.”

“Sorry, just…okay, go on in, I’ll talk to him,” Scott says, looking as if even his brave, determined, courageous soul is cringing before the effort this is going to take. “Derek knows which lab it is, and—”

“If he asks me _one_ more time whether I’ve got a cousin he can import for his team, I’m going to punch his face,” Derek mutters. “Should’ve fucking eaten him when they switched the budget from basketball to lacrosse.”

Then he takes the hand off his face and starts walking towards the school. Stiles and Peter end up looking at each other, and with a surprisingly minimal amount of insinuation, Peter nods for Stiles to go ahead of him.

“I can guess by how everybody’s acting, but just to cover off all our bases, we don’t think the coach is involved?” Stiles asks.

“With these melting mental-psycho monster things?” Derek gets in first, making Peter, who was busy pulling the door shut behind them, look very miffed. “Finstock teaches econ, not chemistry, and anyway, he’d only care if they could guarantee the lacrosse team wins regionals.”

Stiles is slightly irritated by the slight air of this-should-be-obvious he’s getting off of Derek, seeing as it should be obvious Stiles doesn’t know the town that well. “You’d be surprised what people think Cthulhu and friends can do for them,” he says. “There was one guy who thought the best way to use them was in a wax museum.”

Peter makes an incredulous noise as he saunters up. “A wax museum? But doesn’t that cut down your revenues if your repeat customers go insane?”

“Yeah, well, people who summon Cthulhu aren’t really known for their financial savvy,” Stiles shrugs. Swerving Peter’s little attempt at hip-bumping, though okay, yeah, he lets Peter go around the corner first because of the back view. It’s for both of their benefits, really, going by how smug Peter looks.

They go up to the second floor. Pretty standard school hallway, though since classes are over, the walls have been stripped of the usual posters and so the place looks oddly sterile, even after Derek flips on the lights. The classroom doors are all locked, but unsurprisingly, Peter has a solution to that. Which keeps him back a second to lecture Derek, who’d also had a solution to that called his fist, but Melissa had expressly told them that if there was property damage, there’d also better be a weird corpse to justify all the excuses she’d have to make to the principal.

So Stiles goes into the lab first, with his handy scanning antenna plugged into his phone. Normally he’d do a perimeter walk first and then work his way into the center of the room, but the app on his phone is freezing up, the signal is so strong, so he goes ahead and turns towards the little door just behind the teacher’s desk.

“That’s the storage room for all the labs,” Derek says, sniffing loudly. “Yeah, that’s what we were smelling on that shirt.”

“What was?” Stiles asks.

Derek gestures irritably at the door. “That.”

“Yes, Derek, but it’s an entire room of chemicals, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for you to narrow it down,” Peter sighs. He’s already slipped by Stiles and is working at the lock. “Although I think I know what…hmm, I’ll need to get in to make sure, but if you’ll just give me a second…”

Stiles leaves the man to it and wanders off behind the desk. He’s going for the windows since it’s been a while and Scott still hasn’t joined them, so he thinks he’ll see if he can spot Scott from where they are, but then he notices the readings on his app are spiking again. He takes a step to the right, then back, and then to the left, and narrows it down to the desk itself.

Nothing’s on the desk, so he starts going through the drawers, but doesn’t turn up anything there either, aside from some generic supplies. “Is this classroom even assigned to anybody?” he mutters. “I mean, I know it’s summer and all, but do teachers have to clean out their stuff when the kids do?”

“I thought you went to school,” Derek says, slouching near one end of the desk, hands in jeans pockets and scowl firmly fixed on his face. Though he’s not looking at Stiles—he keeps glancing at the door and then at the windows, clearly jumpy under the bad temper. “Double major whatever with an Evil Horrors minor.”

Stiles resists the urge to throw his phone at Derek, and instead just grabs a pencil from the desk so he can scribble some tracking-rune graffiti on the desk’s underside. “ _Eldritch_ horrors, and yeah, that’s _college_ where if you want to evict a professor, it’s standard to make your will first and disown your family so they don’t get hit with any hereditary curses. And that’s just at the normal places, from what I hear about tenure.”

“Ah, there we are,” Peter says, as something clicks and then hinges creak. As Stiles looks up, he steps back from the now-open storage room. “Derek, if you’d like to—”

Drop into a hole, or something else rude, but as Peter looks at Derek, his expression abruptly shifts from exasperated to irritated but puzzled. As for his part, Derek hunches his shoulders and then spreads them in one of the most aggressively defensive ‘what’ shrugs Stiles has ever seen, so Stiles assumes that they’re doing their werewolf communication thing. He goes on and steps into the storage room.

Again, pretty standard stuff, and it’s even all nicely and logically organized so it doesn’t take that long for Stiles to determine nothing unusual is there. No jars of suspicious dried animal parts stuffed back behind the innocuous stuff on the highest shelf, no strangely color-changing liquids with handwritten labels in obscure languages…nope, just your normal high-school chemistry closet.

“Maybe it’s like the tree, and they were mixing the stuff into the floor-cleaning solution or something,” Stiles mutters to himself. “Though if that’s it, you really have to wonder about this janitor’s taste in…suppliers…”

When he turns around and looks out the doorway into the classroom, it’s not the classroom.

It’s _a_ classroom, but it’s one that should be in Miskatonic University, all the way across the country. Stiles knows that. He knows he’s being screwed with, and his thumb is already swiping madly at his phone—he tries to concentrate on the way the edges of the phone press into his clutching hand, on the reality of _that_ , but. It’s just. It’s really, really detailed.

The woodwork isn’t just accurate, with all that old-fashioned molding and ugly carved scones. It’s got the right glow to it, starting out all warm like a Dickens novel but then, when you start moving around, the highlights go all soured yellow, curdled eggs, just like the faces of the people sitting in the room. And the acoustics, which are like nowhere else in the world that Stiles has been: they don’t soften up and absorb voices like wood should do, but seem to amplify it.

No, not amplify—that doesn’t cover how the wood vibrates along with the sharp words, making shrill voices even shriller and dragging them out so that they keep on sawing at you. They’d do that anyway, you knew that, you walked into class with your books clutched in front of you knowing that you’d walk out with them dragging at your hands, useless because it doesn’t matter what’s in them or how well you know them. You were always just going to get in there and be torn to shreds because you—you—know—

“—iles! _Stiles_! Stiles, it’s me, it’s Scott—”

“But I do know!” Stiles is saying over and over again. “Listen to me, just—just would you _listen_ , just for a second, it’s not—no, I know, I _do_ know—”

“Stiles, I’m listening, I am, but you gotta—”

That was a weird voice, Stiles thinks, all wild and urgent, breaking through the steady, endless piping drone that Stiles isn’t any good, that what he knows doesn’t matter, that he’s just not _good_ enou—

Something smashes into the side of his jaw, and Stiles had been sure he’d been standing up, right at the front, up by the lectern where there was nowhere to hide, but suddenly his hips and his calves are banging on something hard and his shoulders smack into something too, and when he throws out his hands, they hit resistance way sooner than he expects. He blinks and pain blooms in his jaw, throwing a kind of wavering black mesh over his vision, and he just grabs and hangs on and blinks like crazy, and…not a classroom.

A hallway, and a bunch of wild, very violent-sounding animals snarling and scrapping near enough that Stiles yelps and jerks in his legs. His knees collide with a warm, grunting body and he immediately tries to twist away, only to find out he’s actually holding _onto_ that body when Peter’s face swims into view.

“Stiles?” he says sharply, staring into Stiles’ eyes. He’s half-behind Stiles, positioned like he’d been holding back Stiles’ arms, though now he’s turning himself out from between Stiles and the wall so he can see Stiles’ face. “Did you or didn’t you double major in Esoteric Mathematics and Xeno—”

“What? No, are you kidding, math major at Miskatonic? That’s like deep-frying your brain and serving it up to the Great Old Ones with a pickle and malt vinegar,” Stiles sputters.

Peter snorts, catches himself, and then slumps with a relief so sharp it even seems to surprise him. He pulls away the hand he’d had over Stiles and glances away, embarrassed and actually more uncomfortable about it than he’d been over his bickering niece and nephew. Which…Stiles looks over with him, just in time to see a truly pissed-off Scott climbing off of Derek, who’s sprawled out on the floor a couple yards away.

“You didn’t have to _hit_ him,” Scott snaps, and then he turns to Stiles. He starts and then drops so quickly on his knees that Stiles eeps a little. “Oh, sorry, just, you’re back? You’re back, right?”

“Um. Uh, yeah, I—” And then it hits Stiles just what’s just happened. “I’m. I’m. I’m me. Yeah.”

Scott’s shoulders drop and he whooshes out his breath, then sits back on his heels, smiling in pure happiness. “Wow,” he says. “Okay. You were—Peter dragged you out before you grabbed anything, but some of the stuff you were saying…but you’re okay. I mean, you are, right? Do you need to go to the hosp—”

“What? No. No, I’m—I’m out of it now,” Stiles says. He shakes Peter off and then pushes himself up against the wall. He’s thinking about standing up, but when he puts his hands down on the floor, they’re still twitching. So he just shoves them under him and tries to breathe. “It’s not like the—the other people, they’re—that’s Shub-Niggurath acting on them. What—what got me, that’s a trigger spell, it’ll—it’ll open you up to the Great Old Ones if you let it, but it’s not _them_. It’s something the evil wizard did.”

“So we stopped it in time,” Scott says after a second. He looks back at the classroom, then gets up on his feet, still looking at it. “It was booby-trapped, is that what you were saying? I’d better call Mom, we should get the room shut down…maybe the whole school, if you can’t figure out what it was…”

What it was. Right, Stiles thinks, that’s what he needs to be focusing on. Never mind what the hell he’d been hearing in that hallucination, the point is, he’s the one who knows this stuff. He knows it and it matters and they’re all looking at him again, and that’s when he realizes he’s been saying that out loud.

“Stiles,” Peter says, cutting Scott off. He’s very modulated about it, but he’s still doing that tone you use with fragile people you don’t want to scare. “What did you see, exactly?”

“Nothing that’s going to help us find this asshole,” Stiles snaps, and then he shoves himself to his feet. His hands are still shaking but whatever, he can just squeeze them together and use his nose-tip to…his phone. Where the hell did he drop his phone, God, he didn’t actually break _that_ on top of everything, did he? “Just your usual school nightmare.”

“Stiles,” Scott says. “Stiles, seriously, are you—”

“I’m fine,” Stiles mutters, looking around for the phone. “I’m fine. I’m fine! Really, I mean, it’s not like I haven’t had that one before. I’ve had it lots, and wide-awake, even! Plenty of presentations that don’t go right in college, it’s not like it’s the first time I’ve been told I’m not good enough. So I’m fine, okay?”

When Scott reaches for him, he ducks away and then sees his phone lying just inside the classroom doorway. It’s screen-up and amazingly, the anti-breaking protections seem to have held. But when Stiles makes a dive for it, Scott gets in the way. Even pushes Stiles back against the jamb. “Stiles, look, you’re not,” Scott starts.

“I’m _fine_ ,” Stiles goes on. “I’m _used_ to it, all right? Miskatonic’s one of those old-money places, everybody’s known each other since they were hanging each other in Salem, and here comes this random Polish kid who only got in because his dad’s kind of good with a flamethrower, sure, whatever, I can recite the last line of the Saaamaaa Ritual, I’ve got Nephren-Ka’s version of the _Book of the Dead_ memorized in English, Greek, Coptic and the original Old Egyptian—”

“Stiles,” Scott says, with an echo from Peter.

“—but that doesn’t matter, what matters is I’m not pedigreed for five generations of inbreeding and I’m _still_ smarter than them, I write better grants, I get my papers published so no, okay?” Stiles hisses. “No! No, nobody likes me! I’m not good enough for that! I’m that charity case smartass who always makes you look like an idiot and then _footnotes_ how stupid you are, why the hell would you?”

“Because you’re awesome,” Scott snaps.

They stare at each other. Scott’s still pinning Stiles against the doorway and while he’s not hurting Stiles or anything, it’s probably the first time Stiles has had firsthand experience with the whole werewolf-strength thing. He also looks really, really angry, with this reddish sheen to his eyes that is genuinely unnerving.

“Because they sound like jerks, and you’re cool. You’ve always been cool, you were always the cool one of the two of us,” Scott says. He breathes in and eases off on Stiles, though his hands stay on Stiles’ shoulders. The red goes out of his eyes and then he drops back, ducking his head in a moment of embarrassment. Though then he looks right back up and he’s still pretty damn sure about what he’s saying. “And _I_ like you. I mean, okay, I used to like you, because we fell out of touch, but I—you’re still—I mean, I know we’re getting to know each other again, but I still think you’re somebody I want to be friends with, and I was hoping we’d get there.”

Stiles is gasping a little bit. He’s kind of dizzy too, especially once Scott finally lets go of him, and he has to press up against the doorway for support.

“Anyway, it’s just some evil guy’s idea of screwing with you,” Scott adds, and something about that just strikes Stiles as funny.

Maybe it’s how awkward Scott is about it, because even with decent motivation, sniping at people isn’t his strong point. Maybe it’s just because Stiles _is_ that screwed by a stupid boobytrap he should’ve seen coming. But it’s funny, and Stiles snorts, and then he has to bring his hand up and press it over his mouth to keep in the laugh, because he thinks he’s recovering but just in case, he doesn’t want to hear whether it’s hysterics.

Concerned, Scott reaches out again, but Stiles has pulled himself together enough to stagger forward. He grabs Scott by the shoulder, then manages to pat the other man on the back. “Scotty, seriously, I missed you,” he says, and he really, really means it. He hopes that comes out through the snickering. “I did. Okay. So—”

“Would this work like you mentioned possession does?” Peter pipes up. He’s a little hesitant about it, but once he sees that Stiles isn’t about to go into another bout of giggling, he pushes on. “Some kind of activator?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it would,” Stiles says. He shifts around so he can look past Scott’s head into the storage room. “That must have been what I was picking up with my phone. I had it set to Cthulhic but wasn’t filtering out all kinds of magic. So we should check everything—”

“Pencil,” Derek says. He’s pushed himself into a sitting position and is prodding at his bruised cheekbone. Then he points at something on the floor. “You started coming out of it when you dropped it.”

All of a sudden Stiles’ jaw starts hurting. Granted, it doesn’t hurt as much as Derek’s face seems to look, but still. “Which is why you hit me,” he says.

Derek gives Stiles a disgusted look and then gets up, giving his jacket a huffy tug as he does. “Yeah, because you tried to stab my _arm_ with it,” he says.

Stiles…can’t speak to that, but Scott still doesn’t look too thrilled with Derek. “You’re a werewolf, you could’ve just grabbed his wrist,” Scott mutters. He steps back from Stiles and looks around, then nods when he spots the pencil too. “Okay. It’s over there, nobody touch it. I’ll call—”

“I got it from the desk,” Stiles says. “From a box. It was pretty full, and there were more boxes in that drawer.”

Scott looks up sharply, hisses through his teeth, and then yanks out his phone like his life depends on it.

* * *

When Melissa gets the download, she sends the police over to close off the school. She also wants them to go out and wait for the police to show up, but Stiles doesn’t want to lose any time sweeping the school for other triggers and Scott argues his mom down on Stiles’ behalf. So when Scott says Stiles should have someone with him at all times, Stiles doesn’t make much of a fuss.

Peter actually isn’t the one, because somebody has to go out and explain things to the cops and Melissa nominated him, and he regretfully admits that Stiles aside, he’s the most likely to come up with a believable cover story for them. “And Alan and Chris are on their way over as well,” he says, clearly reluctant. “Scott, Chris says he needs to talk to you.”

“I’ll call him,” Scott immediately says.

“No, he says to meet him out front,” Peter says. “Just the messenger, McCall, and very much against my will.”

Scott presses his lips together, and then, sparing Stiles’ pride a little, he looks at Derek. Who rolls his eyes and stuffs his hands a little deeper in his coat pockets. “Fine, I swear I won’t hit him again,” Derek says. “I’ll just carry him out screaming so you can shake him in the parking lot, how’s that?”

“You know, you could—” Scott starts. Then he shakes his head. “I’ll loop back when I find out what Chris wants, and swap out with you.”

Derek shrugs. Scott hesitates a second longer so Stiles sighs and gives him a little wave off. “I’m not going to touch anything, we’re just scanning now, so I’ll have my mind intact and ready to curse him with neverending smiles. Trust me, that one’s a bad one.”

“Well, okay,” Scott says doubtfully, but he starts off.

“If he isn’t back in time, I’ll be,” Peter says, turning his gaze from Derek to Stiles. “Alan should be able to hold down things out front once he’s been briefed. Do you need anything from the car?”

“Oh, yeah, actually, there are sample bags in my backpack—but you can’t open my bag without me, so you know what, just bring that with you,” Stiles says. And then gives himself a shake, because he really needs to get back with it.

Peter nods, pauses like he might ask something else, and then just says he’ll try and be quick about it. He gives Derek a long look, with maybe a quick-curled lip to flash fang, and then he walks away.

Stiles starts walking too, since it’s a big school and pencils obviously are going to be everywhere. In the desk it’d only been that one box, but then they’d found two more pencils rolling loose in the storage room, one of them stuck way beneath a cabinet where it might not be found for years. Once they do all the open areas and get rid of the obvious, immediate dangers, Stiles is going to have to sit down with his laptop and trawl the counterspell archives for any possible blanket incantations. Otherwise he’ll have to ask his dad to send in a team, just in case.

Well, honestly, Stiles is going to have to ask his dad for that anyway, he thinks. He’s not so full of himself that he’ll put other people at risk—that’s a difference he’s always held between himself and the legacy dickheads at Miskatonic.

“All these people in the hospital, did they get pencils too?” Derek suddenly asks.

“I don’t know,” Stiles mutters. His app beeps and he turns towards a classroom, then exhales irritably as Derek cuts in front of him. “Look, I said I know not to touch now, all right? So—”

Derek doesn’t say anything. Just looks back at him, while jiggling the knob to show the classroom door is locked. Stiles shuts up and Derek goes off a couple yards, grabs a paperclip from where it was pinned to a corkboard, and untwists it to use to pick the lock.

“So you really don’t have to break the doors,” Stiles can’t help saying.

“Yeah, when I have time.” Derek’s less annoyed about it than Stiles was expecting. He steps back and Stiles thinks he’s done, but just as Stiles goes into the classroom, Derek mutters, “Usually I just want to get out of here as fast as I can. But if we’re stuck here, we’re stuck here.”

It’s a false reading so Stiles comes right back out. “So why _do_ you keep coming back?” Stiles asks.

He just means to the school, since one, it’s pretty obvious at this point that Derek’s ‘bad associations’ include it, and two, Derek could have gone his own way once they got to his family’s house, but he’d come along anyway, and kept coming along. But from how Derek stiffens and goes quiet, he clearly thinks Stiles is asking an entirely different question.

Stiles thinks about explaining that hey, he’s been in Beacon Hills for _three_ days, but…well, frankly, he wants to get out of the school too. But he’s not going to let anybody else walk into the shitstorm he’s just gone through, and being undistracted by the petty things usually does make the nasty parts go faster. So he just keeps going down the hall.

The rest of it is clear, which means the second floor is fine. They head down to the first, much larger floor, and Stiles checks a layout map tacked up across from the main office, then sighs as he calculates how much square footage he has left.

“The only thing that sucks more than getting caught in something shitty is watching somebody else get caught in it,” Derek suddenly says, coming up to look at the map with Stiles. “Laura doesn’t want to move now that she’s put that much of her own blood into this place, and Scott’s annoying but he doesn’t deserve all the crap that rolls through town either.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Stiles mutters. His phone beeps and he glances down at it, then curses as he realizes how drained the battery is. And like an idiot, he left his cordless charger in his backpack. Fine, so Peter’s bringing that to him, but he still feels like his standards have slipped a _ton_ , and he’s just a couple weeks out from commencement. “Guess in that case, you just put up and shut up, and hope they know what they’re doing.”

“Because they do,” Derek says. He twists a little bit towards Stiles. His eyes drop and he’s clearly peeking at Stiles’ phone, and doesn’t even try to look embarrassed when Stiles catches him at it. “Look, everybody here has been through a lot of shit. Your stuff might be eldritch, whatever that means, but it comes down to, it’s trying to get at us, and maybe we don’t know all the details every time, but we know what that means. We know how to act like it, too.”

“You know, Peter already gave me the lecture about how werewolves are actually diabolically smart and all that,” Stiles says. “I know you’re not stupid.”

Derek rolls his eyes. “Yeah, well, I’m supposed to think you aren’t either, but you’re not listening.”

Stiles starts to reply. Then he thinks he should just ignore the guy and concentrate on work, but he’s got a low phone battery and two school wings to cover, plus a gym. Then he just powers down his phone, swallowing an aggravated noise as he does, and gets that off his mind as he tries to straighten himself out.

“That’s an app, right?” Derek asks. When Stiles nods, Derek looks like he’s swallowing his own repertoire of grump, but he manages to mostly sound civil. “So does it only work on your phone?”

“No, but you all aren’t going to know how to read the data, and without the probe, you only have a range of six feet at most,” Stiles says.

“I don’t know if Scott got around to showing you, but we’re werewolves, we can move pretty fast when we want to,” Derek says dryly. “And can’t you just go over the data later? We can match it up to our sweep pattern, we’ve done that before.”

Stiles starts to ask just how many times they had to do that to have an established sweep pattern for the high school, then bites that back. “Of course you have,” he mutters. “And I’m what, going to sit on my ass while you do that?”

“Well, you want to work yourself into another fit, go ahead,” Derek says. “But Scott’s going to feel guilty as hell about it.”

“You say that like you have firsthand experience,” Stiles says after a second. “Emphasis on the guilt-tripping.”

Derek tightens up all over, and for a second Stiles thinks he might walk off. But then he shakes it off, snorting. “Yeah, so I do. So what, are _you_ going to tell me what happened to you doesn’t suck as much as it looks like?”

Stiles makes a face and looks at the map of the school again, but honestly, his thoughts are getting a little blurry. And then his stomach lurches, and he realizes he’s hungry—they skipped the dinner, he suddenly remembers. Diner. He came out here for a _vacation_. Jesus.

He woke up at lunch and he’s already tired again, he thinks. “I guess at this hour, nobody’s coming into the school anyway, even if the whole town wasn’t terrified of Scott’s mom,” Stiles says, watching Derek out of the corner of his eye. He gets an affirming grunt and a some half-hearted poking at that black eye Scott gave the guy. “And it might actually be a toss-up whether Peter would be happier about me bending Miskatonic’s online Terms of Use to get him access to forbidden knowledge, or about getting another excuse to drive me to Scott’s place.”

Derek looks like he totally called it, and he is really, really unhappy about it. “Wardrobe mix-up? Really? I can _smell_ you two.”

“Hey, whatever, smell is not actually directly correlated with action, okay? I’ve known him all of three days,” Stiles says. “I might not have safe, sane, and completely consensual taste in college majors, but I’m not _that_ big an adrenaline junkie.”

The glance Derek shoots Stiles is skeptical, but amused enough for Stiles to start seeing a strong family resemblance with Peter. “If he doesn’t get bored in the first ten minutes, he never gives up on it,” he says.

“I am both flattered, and making a note to myself to refresh on Miskatonic’s stalker-awareness resources,” Stiles says.

“Well, maybe that’ll be helpful,” Derek snorts. “Then again, you keep going on about ‘eldritch’ whatever, so I don’t know what they teach you there.”

“Listen, I worked my ass off for _four straight years_ to have the right to officially drop ‘eldritch’ into casual conversation,” Stiles says. “Do _not_ belittle that.”

Derek looks at Stiles again, with twice as much skepticism and half as much amusement. Then his head ticks to the side, but he’s not nervous about whatever he hears, and a second later he relaxes again. “Peter’s got your bag and coffee,” he mutters.

Stiles nods. Looks at his phone another time, and then—no, all right, he really needs to…he needs to stop screwing up. Actually do what he tells people about teamwork and that stuff, not just push out a little lip-service and then run in the other direction. And as much as it pains him to admit it, Derek has a point about remembering he is not just waltzing around in a hypothetical, he is in an actual place with actual local conditions, and it’s not even Derek. Melissa’s been saying that too, and so has Scott, in his way, and even Peter. And he just…he needs to stop.

“Yeah,” he sighs.

“Good.” Derek jerks his head to the side, cracking his neckbones, and then lets out a low, satisfied noise. “Also, this conversation never happened.”

Stiles looks at him, then snorts. “What? What, you mean, where you stopped punching stuff and actually showed off some empathy skills, big angry werewolf that you are? By the way, about the punching, my jaw doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

Derek reaches up and flips up his coat-collar, like a slick leather wall between him and Stiles. “I wasn’t trying, on _purpose_. Maybe you want to think about that.”

“Yeah, yeah, me and Scott, my also-punchy friend,” Stiles says, snorting again. “Also, thanks.”

Derek gives him a suspicious side-look, to which Stiles just gazes back, completely serious. Which, predictably, makes Derek even more suspicious. His eyes narrow, and then he scowls and edges just that little bit away from Stiles.

Yep, Stiles, thinks. He’s himself again. It’s all just…him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wax museum references the Lovecraft/Hazel Heald collaboration _The Horror in the Museum_.
> 
> The Nogitsune still happened in this universe, but since Stiles wasn't around, it went after Derek. Who, thanks to his sad function on the show as the Tragic Plot Device, seems like the most likely target if you're talking who's the most emotionally vulnerable person in town.
> 
> Saaamaaa Ritual is from Hodgson's _Carnacki_ stories. Nephren-Ka is scattered over several Mythos writers, but anyway, he was a super-evil pharaoh.


	4. Chapter 4

Stiles installs the public version of the app on Deaton’s and Chris Argent’s phones, gives them the quick-start tutorial, and then leaves them the shielded sample bags so they can take out anything they find. He was going to put the app on Peter’s phone, too, but when he says he wants a little rest, preferably with a meal, Peter says he’ll take Stiles to the diner.

Scott has to stay and help search the school, which he’s very gracious about. In fact, he seems genuinely happy that Stiles isn’t going to have to skip the diner again, even if he doesn’t get to be there. “I guess you could get me a couple of their lemon bars?” he says, pushing off the last of Stiles’ apologies. He gets out his wallet and then stuffs a ten-dollar bill in Stiles’ hand. “Mom loves them and she’s gonna be tired when she—yeah, yeah! Coming!”

So off he goes to direct cops, while Stiles has his diner food.

It’s still good. The fries are less greasy than Stiles remembers, and while that makes them objectively better, subjectively he kind of wants the old salt-lick, scrub your hands with detergent ones. But the sweet potato soup’s still like a thick blanket on a cold day, and they still make you open your own can of soda. Some things around this place haven’t changed.

The sound of Peter sighing makes Stiles look up, and he catches the other man mid-glare at his phone. Peter’s been pretty quiet, not really trying for conversation, just throwing off the occasional comment about the weather or the rhubarb-themed cobbler special, and when he realizes Stiles is looking at him, his smile is suspiciously lacking in insinuating pushiness.

“Everything you hoped for?” he says, nodding at the soup.

“Still tastes the same,” Stiles shrugs. Which is not that enthusiastic, and he _wanted_ to eat here. “I mean, it’s good. It’s…my mom used to take me here. She liked how quick the kitchen is.”

“They do have a remarkable turn-around time,” Peter says. Supposedly he’s not hungry, which is why he just skipped to the dessert menu, but his milkshake is tall enough that he’s in danger of stabbing the straw into his chin whenever he starts to slouch. “Personally, I also appreciate that they do the full menu at all hours. So often the graveyard shift gets shorted on leftovers and subpar egg cookery, you know.”

“Yeah? Do they also ignore the weird stains in the bathroom, so long as you mop it up yourself?” Stiles says.

Peter’s smile turns amused. “I’m not sure what exactly you’re suggesting, Stiles, but it’s a diner. I come here to eat, not to abuse the facilities.”

Stiles snorts and then scrapes at the last of the soup. He raises his spoon to his mouth, pauses, and then lowers it. “So I’m fine.”

“I see,” Peter says, after just enough of a pause to show he had to think over how to respond.

“That stuff happens a lot. I mean, it’s upfront in the university lab waiver, two block paragraphs, all caps. It’s why, if your major isn’t on the exempt list, you have to sign up for mandatory psych check-ups,” Stiles goes on. Then he catches himself, just as the rambling’s picking up some real steam. He exhales and presses his hand against his face, then looks at Peter. “Look, if you’re in this for the potential power trip, I’m not going to pretend you can’t get that without going crazy, or having somebody like my dad come after you. I know you’ll just see through that one. But let me just say, that stuff back there? That is pretty com—”

Peter’s expression goes through some complicated changes, involving, at the very least, being offended, being confused, and at one point, being resigned. But eventually what is settles on is a kind of weary wistfulness. “Stiles, I never said I was interested in _deploying_ what I happen to learn.”

“No, fine, you didn’t, but the first thing I know about you, you’re trying to draw summoning circles off the Sussex edition,” Stiles points out. “What is it they say about actions?”

“Actually, the first thing you knew about me, or thought you knew, anyway, was that I was potentially Melissa’s post-divorce consolation candy. What is it they say about revealing more about yourself?” Peter parries. He sits there and smirks, fingering his milkshake straw in a vaguely obscene manner, as Stiles sputters, glares, and then gives up and just jams that last spoonful of soup into his mouth. Then his smile eases off the smugness and goes back towards rueful. “I’m a werewolf, being violently defensive of my interests is just as characteristic as madness is of the Great One Ones. But outside of that, I’m really not that aggressive.”

Stiles puts his spoon down and looks at him.

And Peter raises a finger. “Amoral? Well, Miskatonic seems like a place that’d give you a fine education in how _that_ in turn depends on what you consider is moral. Competitive? I’ll admit to that, but it’s hardly something to demonize on its own. Persistent? Most people consider that a virtue. So please, let’s not get confused about what we’re talking about.”

“Which is…what, exactly? According to you?” Stiles asks.

“What I told you before,” Peter says. He pauses and a flicker of frustration goes over his face, along with what might be real uncertainty. “A potential partnership, based on common interests as well as self-interest. I’m not looking for someone to do my work _for_ me.”

“Okay, look, I’m not trying to call you out,” Stiles says, sighing. “I’m just—I’m trying to be upfront here, due diligence and all that. People don’t react well when they find out you were bigging up the resume.”

Peter raises his brows. “So you only had a double minor, single major?”

“What? No! I double-majored and had extra credits on top of that, I could’ve had double double if I’d—” Then Stiles notices the little glint in Peter’s eyes. “Oh. _Oh_. I see what you did there.”

“I hope so, because I did think you were a little smarter than my niece, who seems to think being an alpha and leading a pack are entirely separate jobs,” Peter mutters. He pushes back and pumps his straw in the milkshake, smushing at the ice cream collected at the bottom, then takes a long, cheek-hollowing suck. Then he looks up again, and sure, he’s enjoying how Stiles is _very_ annoyed about enjoying that, but mostly he’s still serious. “When I say partnership, I mean partnership. You don’t expect each partner to be fully equipped for every situation, or else why would you need a partner?”

“I know that makes sense, and I’m not saying I disagree, but if the world worked like that all the time, I would be a _much_ nicer person,” Stiles says.

Irritatingly enough, Peter looks skeptical about that last part. And he doesn’t even voice it, just lifts one of those eyebrows, which somehow he’s managing to do with better aim than half the sarcastic retorts Stiles can think of. 

“Well, I’m not the rest of those idiots,” Peter finally says. He pauses and his eyes drop to the table between them. “I’ve tried a few ways to get what I want, actually. I know there are more direct methods, ways where you don’t have to rely on others, and I _do_ understand your reluctance about dependence—I share it, in fact. But…werewolves are just as much in the world, after all. Well, unless I’d like to revert and take up a hermitage, but that seems rather drastic, denying myself the benefits of civilization to pander to the stupidity of others.”

“Can’t resist the siren call of overpriced coffee, huh,” Stiles says. His bowl doesn’t have enough soup left for another spoonful, but it’s got enough traces that he can drag them around with the tip of his spoon, make little Cthulhu-heads in the bowl bottom. “So what you’re saying is, really, you’re just a lonely, cranky guy trying to escape your hometown, only with some lunar complications.”

That’s kind of pushing it, and really, Stiles honestly isn’t as hostile to Peter as he has to be coming off. But that’s the thing, that’s when Stiles knows he’d better be the most suspicious—when he doesn’t want to be.

Peter’s nose wrinkles a little, but he’s a lot less offended than Stiles was expecting. If anything, most of his expression is that weary amusement again. “Well, Stiles, it’s just as hard to find somebody who cares about what you know when you’re a vicious werewolf as it is when you’re a lowly college student.”

He looks steadily into Stiles’ eyes and for once it doesn’t feel like he’s doing that with some private pornographic flourishes added. It’s actually—kind of unnerving, how—how plain he is about it, meaning what he says, and Stiles catches himself wanting to look away from it.

“But that’s not—” _fair_ , Stiles mumbles, before catching _that_ too. He makes a face and then puts his hand up in a half-hearted attempt to cover his scowl. “I mean. Okay. I guess—I mean, um, I like you. I mean, I’m _starting_ to like you, because it’s been three days and we’ve spent most of that banishing Cthulhic entities, and—”

“You know, this isn’t a marriage proposal,” Peter says dryly. Then he slurps more milkshake, which doesn’t do much to hide his satisfaction about Stiles’ sputtering.

Stiles pushes down on his side of the booth and then jabs his finger at the smug bastard. “Yeah, well, it’s not a business transaction either. I know the job market’s not great for new graduates right now, but I’m not _there_ yet. Just so you know.”

“Perish the thought,” Peter says, chuckling. He looks at Stiles, stirring his milkshake, with an unusual warmth to the sarcasm that softens its tartness. “Just say we can keep meeting once this is all settled, Stiles, and I’ll happily await your downloads.”

“Okay. Okay, fine,” Stiles says. He sits back up and then reaches over and flicks the side of Peter’s glass to make him look up. “For _meeting_. The downloads, you’ll have to get your paperwork approved, because—”

Peter rolls his eyes. “Three reincarnations, I remember, and of course I will fully comply with the university’s Terms of Use.”

“You’d better, because the Licensing Auditors sure as hell will, and there’s a reason Miskatonic outsources that to Yellow Sign followers,” Stiles says. He withdraws his hand, then slouches back.

That really does seem to be all Peter wants—for now—since he just grins and keeps sucking on his milkshake. Which Stiles could keep watching, and honestly, it wouldn’t be a hardship, but he should probably text Scott, see how they’re doing at the school, or—Stiles starts up, then waves off a suddenly-alert Peter.

“I forgot, I’m supposed to call my dad,” Stiles says. He pulls out his phone and slides out of the booth. “I’ll be…um…”

Peter sighs and holds out his car keys. “You can sit in the car, I can’t eavesdrop from here.”

Stiles gives him a thumbs-up—and then casts a privacy spell once he gets in the car, but he sits on the side of the backseat where Peter can easily see him from the diner windows. “Hey, Dad.”

 _“…oh, hey, son,”_ his dad mumbles groggily. Because Stiles forgot about the time difference, even though his dad does keep late hours at this time of year. But when he starts to apologize, his dad grunts him off and then bangs something and curses and falls into what sounds like a snowstorm of files. _“Shit. You all right?”_

“Are you sleeping in the office again?” Stiles says suspiciously. “Did you eat out of the vending machine? Dad, please don’t tell me that was dinner, I specifically trained your night intern to unplug it and make you at least order in.”

His dad makes a disgusted noise. _“Yeah, I did order in, and then had to feed it all to the damn Deep One delegation so I plugged the vending machine back in before I got so hungry they started looking like gummi fish. Whoever the hell introduced Deep Ones to fried clams has a lot to answer for.”_

“Deep Ones?” Stiles says. “Oh, right, so did you ask?”

 _“They said they’re still waiting on the West Coast colonies, but they think they had somebody inland on a grant exemption. Something about comparative education, I have the San Francisco people looking into it. But sounds like kind of a rogue, they’re not too upset so far,”_ his dad says. There’s still a lot of paper rustling in the background, but it’s calmer, more methodical, probably him tidying up. _“Still fruit fro-yo whatever it was you said?”_

Stiles snorts, then leans his head back against the seat. That tilts him so he’s looking into the diner, where Peter is working at that milkshake. Peter’s looking at his phone at the same time, his brow furrowed, one arm braced against the table so he’s slightly hunched over in concentration. The pose stretches his shirt over his shoulders in very attractive ways—if today’s lesson is that Stiles is very, very human, then hey, he’s got needs—but what he ends up looking at is the way Peter keeps pulling the straw up with his mouth and then pushing it back down. The guy doesn’t have an audience now, so that has to be just a nervous habit of his. He actually has nervous habits.

“I still think it’s just one person at the root of everything, but they’re…they’re kind of good,” Stiles admits. He can’t help dropping his voice to a mutter, but he at least gets it all out. “They kind of caught me with one of those—I was only in it for a minute, tops, and it’s been two hours, no aftershocks, Dad, okay? But one of those—those trance triggers. The worst nightmare one.”

For a long second his dad is quiet, with even the rustling gone. Then he takes a long, slow breath. _“I can tell you still don’t want me running in, but do you want to come home?”_ he asks. _“San Francisco can get someone out by the morning.”_

“No. No, and it’s not—it’s not just because—I think I’m that good, or I’m trying to fix it, Dad. It’s not.” Stiles takes a breath himself, trying to cut out that whiny-kid tone. “I mean, I wouldn’t even rule out a team of yours, personally, but it’s—I don’t know that that’s really my call? I mean, it’s not my town, and the people here been really good at handling it so far, and it’s just they don’t have the background but once you explain it to them, they—and I mean, I can explain stuff from Scott’s place if I have to, right? Just text it to them, or call.”

 _“You could, but you don’t have to. But don’t yell at me, I can already tell you don’t want to go there either.”_ His father says something else, something too far from the phone for Stiles to catch, though he gets that worried edge. _“I can’t make you leave, but just watch your limits, would you? They’re not dares or insults, Stiles—and if this has anything to do with those jackasses who were harassing you after commencement—”_

“No, I know, and I will. I’ll keep calling too. With the live calls, even, haven’t gotten around to a voicemail yet,” Stiles says. He holds his breath and when his dad sighs, he knows he’s gotten over the hump. “Anyway, I didn’t even want to do a stupid speech. I tried to bomb my Advanced Crypto-archaeology final so I wouldn’t have to, but Curwen had to go and score right under me, and I guess you just can’t save some idiots.”

 _“Yeah. Yeah, well, it was a good speech anyway. Didn’t make my team break out any containment gear, so it’s not just you’re my kid,”_ his dad says gruffly. He audibly fidgets for a few seconds, then sighs again. _“Well, I’ll get a feel for the local opinion and think it over. I think I better just for prepping the cover story, but look, I know you’ll figure whatever’s going on there out. Just leave yourself some vacation, all right?”_

Stiles smiles. “Sure, Dad. I’ll do that.”

He ends the call and stares at his phone for a little bit afterward. Doesn’t think it’s that long, when he finally shakes himself and starts scrolling through missed texts, but he’s barely checked two threads when there’s a light knock on the door. Peter, lifting the carton of lemon bars Stiles forgot.

“I didn’t give you Scott’s ten,” Stiles says, opening the door and taking it.

“Never mind,” Peter shrugs.

Stiles frowns and slides his hand off the carton. He presses Peter’s keys back into Peter’s hand, but then hangs onto Peter’s wrist. “You got lunch too, and okay, the innuendo kind of earned you that one, but I’m not a total freeloader.”

Peter’s got this little satisfied smile playing around his face as his eyes drop slowly to Stiles’ grip, then, just as slowly, travel back up to Stiles’ face. “Well, if it’ll settle your conscience, I owe Melissa a few, and they are for her, after all.”

“Okay,” Stiles says, and then he lets go of Peter.

Who keeps staring at him. There’s a little ripple of movement around Peter’s shoulders, maybe like he’s going to—no, he’s pulling back and straightening up. He stands there, hand casually draped over the top of the door, for a second, long enough for Stiles to consider being the one who slides across.

Then he shuts the door. He walks around and gets in behind the wheel, and drives them over to Scott’s place.

Allison’s out, but Scott gave Stiles a spare key so they don’t have to wait around. He unlocks the door and then goes to put the lemon bars in the fridge while Peter, who’s brought up his bag with him, drops that beside the couch and then sits to take off his shoes. Stiles is a little thirsty, but instead of looking at the filter pitcher or the milk or even the six-pack crammed into a bottom shelf, he finds himself staring at the lemon bars. Staring and drumming his fingers against the edge of the door.

“Actually, it’s three,” Stiles ends up saying. “There was that bribe sausage, too. Oh, and the jellybeans.”

Peter lets out a gusty sigh. “Stiles, even if I were going to accept some kind of—of make-up compensation, we’d be talking a bit more than ten dollars.”

Stiles shuts the fridge door and turns around and goes into the living area. He pulls out the ten-dollar bill as he gets near Peter. “Right, exactly, and with compound interest it starts adding up and even just a _couple_ years on, we’re talking some serious money here. Like, over annual registration fees and more into licensing territory, maybe even exclusive licensing—”

“I’m not going to pretend I understand where you’re getting those numbers,” Peter says, looking amused and baffled in equal parts. He drops the shoe in his hand and puts both hands back on his knees, like he might stand, and then, instead, he eases them back to the couch. “But I do have to question the math based on its likely source at Miskatonic—”

“Math isn’t _inaccurate_ just because it’s probably evil and going to induce a Renfield complex in you,” Stiles says.

“—and secondly,” Peter goes on, with the amusement definitely increasing, but not exactly winning out. “If I understand your general drift, at least, you do know that a debt is _not_ a long con by definition, it has a real basis—”

“Would you just take it so I stop feeling guilty about you?” Stiles says. He waves the bill in Peter’s face, then pokes it towards the man. Just vaguely, he’s not thinking about where, so it’s all on Peter that he chooses to put up his hand and snip it out of Stiles’ fingers like he just might tuck it into his low-cut v-neck.

Stiles drags his eyes out of Peter’s pecs, and Peter delicately folds the bill one-handed, then tucks it away in a jeans pocket. “So _forceful_ ,” Peter purrs. “Well, all right, I suppose I can take the hit, I usually end up—”

He shuts up when Stiles climbs onto his lap and grabs his head in both hands and starts with the tongue right off the bat. They tilt backward, slightly awkwardly, because weirdly, Peter seems indecisive about how to get involved. Mostly about whether he’d rather grab Stiles’ ass, or grab the couch for leverage to get them back where he can spread his legs and make room for the hand Stiles has rubbing south of his waistband, but there’s a little moment where he hesitates and Stiles can practically _hear_ the ticking gears in his head.

Then Peter goes with ass, dragging at the back of Stiles’ jeans as he uses his feet to push off the coffee table and move them, and Stiles shoves one hand down the front of Peter’s shirt and starts palming a nipple. Peter makes liking, hungry noises, thoroughly engaged with exploring the contours of Stiles’ mouth with his own tongue now, and starts twisting them around like he’s going to do a flip. Which Stiles picks up on, and allows to happen, because if Peter is busy getting him on his back against the couch, Peter is not noticing the exact moment when Stiles squirms his fingers around and cages in Peter’s balls.

“Oh,” Peter says, stopping with his elbows propped on either side of Stiles’ head, eyes a little wide. Then he grins and it’s smug, but it’s a looser, less inwards kind of smug, a lot less about single superiority and a lot more about shared private jokes. “Well, and if you’re free of guilt now, then this is for…”

“Okay, let’s just get this straight right now,” Stiles says. Gives Peter’s balls—a nice, warm handful—a slight tweak. Can’t help licking his lips a little as Peter shudders. “Because there’s socially inept, and then there are the people who call up Cthulhu because they just need to get _laid_ , seriously, I mean, _tentacles_ and ninety percent of the incantations translate to ‘I surrender, please, take me, take my vessel and enter me now!’ and just, buy sex toys, you’ll not only remember the sex, you also won’t have oatmeal for brains, and _also_ , mixed grill and sausage and lemon bars? Bulk candy? I am _not_ that cheap.” 

Peter laughs. Laughs, and moves his hips into Stiles’ hand, going all heavy-lidded with his belly dragging low enough to just rasp over Stiles’ own jeans. “As I said before, I never even considered that,” he says, all low and smoky like the something burning that isn’t actually burning, but that keeps making Stiles twitch under him like they’re on a hot plate. “Like I told you before, I know there are better ways to secure my interests. Especially for the long term.”

“You were very convincing right up to getting ahead of yourself,” Stiles says. Maybe he’s panting a little. Peter throws off a lot of heat.

“Oh, am I?” Peter says. “My apologies, I’ll catch up now.”

Which is when he just _melts_ all over Stiles, melts into this languid but completely un-dislodgeable thing, all slow, sucking kisses and a hand drawing softly down Stiles’ side, just petting, just moving along, nothing to see till suddenly it’s up under Stiles’ shirt and Stiles groans and tugs at Peter’s balls and that was _exactly_ what Peter wanted. An excuse to hitch himself closer, twist in till Stiles has to close his legs around Peter’s hips to keep them from swinging off the couch, and—

Phone. Peter stops first, because it’s his phone. He looks resentful, but also, like he knows better than to let it ring on. “Damn,” he mutters, heaving over onto one hip so he can dig it out. He glances at it and the resentment segues into resignation. “Melissa’s coming over. She wants to see how you’re doing.”

“Oh,” Stiles says. The two of them look at each other. Stiles frowns, then remembers his hand is in Peter’s pants. He pulls it out and then Peter shifts back a few inches, but doesn’t really get off. “Yeah. Um. I should. You know, she’s been really—really nice, considering all the times I got Scott in trouble. And.”

“I suppose I should grab the shower while I can,” Peter sighs. “Derek’s probably going to end up here too, knowing him and Scott.”

He pushes up on his arm and Stiles pushes up, too. Gets his hand twisted in the front of Peter’s shirt, but Peter let his head hang, didn’t move that up and by the time Stiles realizes it Peter’s just tipped over and got him up against the sofa arm and is kissing the hell out of him.

“By the way, I never said it was a bribe,” Peter murmurs, just snugged up against Stiles’ mouth while Stiles catches his breath. “I called it a down payment.”

“Down—down payment,” Stiles gasps.

“Yes, and not for _renting_ , of all things,” Peter says, with a slight nibble to Stiles’ lower lip. Then he’s off, standing beside the couch, fastidiously tweaking down his shirt and smirking down at a mussed, sweaty, sprawled Stiles. “I fully intend to build equity, Stiles. You can’t do _that_ on any kind of lease.”

He bends down, hooks up a change of clothes from his bag, and then saunters off. Stiles flaps his hands against the couch back and hefts upwards, but his ass is canted too far forwards and he ends up flopping down, just a few inches higher up the couch than when he started. “Three meals still aren’t enough for property tax!” he calls after Peter, just on principle.

A lazy snort filters back towards him, and at that point, that’s when Stiles just cuts his losses and turns over so he’s on his side. He digs out his phone and starts to text Melissa. Then Scott. Then Melissa again. Then he slaps his phone against the cushion and pulls up one arm to smush against his face.

Okay. He’s resorting to mortgage metaphors—not that that compound interest reference had been top notch either, to be honest, and the only thing worse than non-Euclidean geometry opening doors to hellish dimensions is jokes about finance. There’s a reason why accounting is too eldritch even for Miskatonic University. “Maybe I should take a nap,” Stiles admits. 

He pulls up his phone again and texts Melissa that he’ll be on the couch waiting for her, then lets his hand flop down. And then, as the sound of the shower starts up gently in the background, he closes his eyes. Just till he stops dying of embarrassment, and then he’ll get back up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yellow Sign references Robert W. Chambers' _King in Yellow_ stories, which influenced Lovecraft a lot, and which he cribbed from for his own Cthulhu Mythos stories.
> 
> In the U.S., the valedictorian traditionally gives one of the speeches during a college commencement ceremony.
> 
> According to Lovecraft's _Dreams in the Witch-House_ , if you study math too hard, it lets evil old women take over your mind.


	5. Chapter 5

“I’m just about to leave to go see him, but he got back to Scott’s apartment just fine,” Melissa says, pinning her phone between her ear and shoulder. She uses her teeth to hold onto the top of the sample bag while she squeezes the zipper shut with her free hand, then drops the bag into the bucket Deaton brought. “He’s been texting me. I thought you said you weren’t worried about him.”

_“I’m n—”_ and then John’s bluster caves in before it ever really gets going _“—come on, you have a kid too, you know I’m lying my ass off about that. I just…I talked to him, I know he’s in one piece, but I just want to know he’s not hiding, too.”_

She should still call him out for making her the go-between, but Melissa can’t help the vibe of sympathy suddenly working in her chest. So she sighs and steps back from the lockers. “Anything I should look for, specifically? Or ask?”

_“I guess if he’s not running his mouth off, or insisting he knows exactly what’s going on,”_ John says, but it’s half-hearted. _“Look, I don’t want to raise the alarm. If I thought he needed to be in the hospital, or put on a flight back, I’d say so.”_

“Well, then what _is_ this? And I’m not asking because I don’t care, but I just…I’m in the dark here,” Melissa says. Then turns, frowning, as the sound of splattering water comes from the showers, but it turns off right away and then she hears Chris cursing. “I can see you two have your own little routines—not that that’s even new—but you both keep hinting and talking around it, and honestly, I’m starting to wonder how much you talk to people outside of that university of yours.”

John lets out a dry chuckle. _“Yeah, that’s what I said, my first year here…sorry, I try to remind myself not to do that, but this place—Stiles never liked it either. He loves learning what they have to teach, don’t get me wrong, but he hates everything else.”_

“So why’d you stay, then?” Melissa says, frowning.

Chris backs out of the shower, disgustedly pulling off his soaked coat as he goes. He spots her and mimes accidentally hitting a knob with his elbow, then goes back to pawing at his front—he really did get a bath, it’s gone all the way through to his shirt. He’s got some oil stains on it anyway, Melissa notices, probably from the basement sweep, and she waves to get his attention, then mimes for him to strip.

_“Well, Claudia. I don’t know how much Stiles told you, but she was too far gone even for the people here. But they had ways of keeping her lucid till the end, even if they couldn’t stop her body breaking down. And then after that, I think we both just—couldn’t think what to do next,”_ John says, sighing. For once he doesn’t sound like he’s running around doing anything. In fact, as far as she can tell, he’s just sitting there and sipping on something. _“It is good money, and he was already in their pre-college program, and I don’t know, you get used to it. But that’s why I was glad Scott got in touch. I thought it might be the kick Stiles needed to get out there, remember he’s got the whole rest of the world to choose from.”_

Chris eyes Melissa a little, but pulls off his shirt. She twists around, pushes her work-bag forward with her foot and then finds the spare t-shirt she always keeps in there for someone, whether it’s Scott or Chris or even one of the Hales. “He does seem to be enjoying himself,” Melissa finds herself saying as she pulls out the shirt for Chris. “When he’s not banishing something, anyway. And Scott’s liked having him, too.”

_“Good. I always felt bad we lost touch—that was mostly my fault,”_ John says. _“Stiles got caught up with hustling Claudia around to her treatments, and I should’ve kept an eye on that, made sure he had time off.”_

“Well, wishes and horses, and we’re talking again now,” Melissa says. Then she frowns and catches Chris’ arm, seeing a raw patch on his lower left back, just above the waistband. She makes him stop putting on the shirt and then stoops down to peer at the scrape, ignoring his attempts to subtly grunt her off. “Oh, speaking of, the State Department called again and I think that’s squared away. But now I’ve got the CDC calling about all the recent psych admittances, and I wasn’t sure—they didn’t sound—”

_“Because they aren’t equipped to get involved, and goddamn it, State is supposed to…don’t answer them, I’ll make some calls.”_ John gets up from wherever he’s sitting, and then Melissa hears the sound of scribbling. _“I told San Francisco to just courier those supplies out if they have to, have you gotten them yet?”_

Melissa looks at Chris, who makes a face and fumbles out his phone. “Forgot to check in, got held up with the sheriff again,” he mutters.

_“…are you with somebody?”_ John asks, suddenly wary. _“Do I need to call back?”_

“Oh, no, it’s just…well, honestly, I should get off and finish this anyway so I can go see Stiles, and I think we hit all the urgent points,” Melissa says. “I’ll email about the supplies, and anything else I forgot, how about that?”

_“Sure,”_ John says. His voice fades like he’s pulling away the phone, but then comes back strong. _“Hey. Thanks for this. I know he’s not your kid, and you have plenty to do already.”_

“Oh, don’t worry about it. I got used to taping up his booboos when he and Scott were little, I don’t mind starting that again,” Melissa says.

John laughs again, then hangs up. And Melissa’s smiling a little too, despite the overall situation, since…yeah, she’d missed the Stilinskis. Infuriating as they could be—all of them—they’d always made her feel as if she really did offer something special.

“Sounds like he’s finally warming up,” Chris says. “Didn’t say a thing about watch what you’re doing.”

She looks up at him, then shoves away her phone and pulls him by the arm again, looking at some dirty spots on the edge of his scrape. “Just in time, since I think we’re getting to where we don’t have the time to watch what _he’s_ doing,” she mutters. “And what were you doing, exactly? Didn’t Danny make you that camera robot so you wouldn’t have to squeeze behind the boiler?”

“I left it in the car and didn’t want to go all the way back out to get it,” Chris says, but he’s pretty apologetic about it. He winces as she pokes an oily spot. “I’ll spray some antiseptic on it.”

“Do that. Tetanus shots don’t cover everything, and God knows you’re terrible at keeping your shot schedule,” Melissa says, reluctantly giving him the shirt. “I’ll let Allison know you need the first-aid kit on my way out.”

Chris opens his mouth, closes it, and then just nods at her. He at least has some sense, she thinks as she walks out.


End file.
